After upgrade to 10525 yesterday, I found that Windows without notification or warning had decided to create a new unwanted Recovery Partition. I have never had one before. I have done probably 10 Insider upgrades since last October and this is first time that Windows has created a separate Recovery Partition. The 451 MB partition was carved out of the Windows 10 partition being upgraded. Does anyone have any idea why this happened on this particular upgrade? More importantly how do I prevent this from happening in the future?
It did not for me. maybe due to the fact I never had one.
For me, the upgrade from Win 8.1 to Win 10 10240 RTM added that partition, which was a surprise to me.
It is 503MB.
I have also been running Build 10240 on a Virtual Machine that did *not* have that partition, but its path to 10240 was via several Insider previews, not a direct install.
bv
when you upgrade or install windows 10, Windows 8/8.1/1. likes to create a separate partition to place the WinRE.wim
this is so as to protect the WinRE.wim form corruption or infection
WinRE.wim is a bootable recovery environment (it is basically a boot.wim. but for recovery)
the reason the size of the winRE partition may very is because windows 10 adds the boot critical drivers to the WinRE.wim
And in some cases the WinRE partition is shared with the System partition.. The system partition being the System Boot partition
On MBR type disk this sharing is normal = usually 500MB partition, due to partition limitation
If you only have a 100MB System partition = it is also not uncommon to find the recovery (winRE.wim) hidden on C:
Windows tries to keep the Boot and recovery options - away from the OS
@Kyhi
In my scenario, I had 8.1 on MBR w only a small, 100MB system boot partition (plus C: & D:, of course).
When I tried to upgrade to 10, it complained that it couldn't use the "system reserved" partition.
So, using MiniTool partition mgr, I basically slid C: & D: up the drive and increased the system boot part to 400MB, figuring that that would be enough.
It then *did* allow the upgrade,
but it *inserted* the new 500MB recovery part between C: & D:, I guess by shrinking C:,
although I didn't check the exact before/after sizes.
Anyway, it sounds like you're saying that if I had made the system boot part, say 600MB, it would have, as you say, "shared" the System Boot part as the Recovery part. as well ?
bv
I have found that if I clean install into an unformatted partition, Win10 will make a Recovery Partition, but if I install it into a prepared NTFS partition, it won't. I've never seen it make a Recovery Partition on an upgrade - including this upgrade to 525.
Whatever. . .if you don't think you'll need it then make it go away. . .. . .but remember to do a backup. . .
I was the normal in-place upgrade to 10240 RTM on the running disk and it created it.
It's not a problem, except that now I've used all 4 MBR parts.
But it was interesting to me.
Of course I could always convert to Logical partition for D: when I need to add another part.
bv
My Windows 7 did not have a recovery partition, probably why when I upgraded I did not get one. I did notice that when I did Clean Install a 450MB partition was created.
If I did have one I would not remove it.
