Deleting Recovery Partition and Merging to C drive

[anandcoral]

My Dell laptop came with Win8, got auto updated to 8.1 and now to 10. 
Now I find that there are 3/4 recovery partition on my hdd. I assume they are for 8, 8.1 and 10.

Deleting Recovery Partition and Merging to C drive

I want to delete those partitions and merge the space into C: partition. I have made USB recovery of Win10.
I googled for help on it and downloaded "EaseUS Partition Master" and "AOMEI Partition Assistant".

Before I start deleting and merging, my query is "Has anyone have similar experience ?"
Any advise on it is valuable for me at this stage.

Regards,

Anand

[MilesAhead]

I have almost zero experience with GPT type drives.  The only thing I did on my Laptop was carve off a piece of C: to use as a data partition.  But I have heard you can run into problems if the recovery partition is not there when restoring images and that type of thing.

Since the space you are recovering is only about 1.3% the size of your current C: partition it may be worth wasting a GB and change to avoid problems.  I did quite a few multi-boot systems in the old MBR days but that experience is nullified with this UEFI/GPT stuff.

[tomos]

hi Anand,
I did something similar with a Dell laptop recently - but it was Windows 7 (which from what I hear works very differently to the more recent OS's)

More Aomei experiences:
I wanted to delete a partition; incorporate the freed-up space into 'C'; then divide 'C' into three partitions:
[C | Data | Partition-with-space-for-one-backup-image]

Aomei Partition Assistant:
# I created a boot usb-flash-drive (it's Win PE)
# on a laptop with three partitions (one a miniscule one with some Dell tools), I:

• deleted the 12GB 'Recovery' partition
• I then had to *move* (and resize) the 'C partition so as it would take over the now unallocated space (this was slow: I had to use an 'up' arrow to increase the size of 'C')

At this stage I rebooted: everything was fine so I created a new 'System image' using Aomei Backerupper
I then booted again with Aomei Partition and:

• split 'C' into two partitions
• then split the newly made partition into two partitions

This one worked fine too
So all in all a very successful experience with both tools

-tomos (August 02, 2015, 12:20 PM)

Aomei Partition Assistant was fairly intuitive to use. Was not always completely logical (for a novice like me) - if there's free space before a partition (as in 'C' in my quote) you have to move the partition into the free space - I cant remember all the details now, but I did try and record the steps, so could dig those images out.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Dell laptops (& desktops?) have software installed that breaks the default Windows image backup. It's called Dell Backup & Recovery' It wasnt clear to me how dependable the free version was - so I did not use it at all. For creating image backups, I also used Aomei - Backerupper, the free version. I did do a couple of restores - they worked without problems.

With Windows 8 & 10 isnt the BIOS different or something though? (I read about that kind of stuff and immediately forget all the details...)
I guess this is logical, but if you do go for it, be sure and record details of all partitions, do an image of the complete drive if you can.

[Shades]

My Dell laptop came with Win8, got auto updated to 8.1 and now to 10. 
Now I find that there are 3/4 recovery partition on my hdd. I assume they are for 8, 8.1 and 10.

[ Invalid Attachment ]

I want to delete those partitions and merge the space into C: partition. I have made USB recovery of Win10.
I googled for help on it and downloaded "EaseUS Partition Master" and "AOMEI Partition Assistant".

Before I start deleting and merging, my query is "Has anyone have similar experience ?"
Any advise on it is valuable for me at this stage.

Regards,

Anand

-anandcoral (September 10, 2015, 10:55 AM)

To me, these partitions look way too small to be recovery partitions. Better investigate what is on these partitions first, before you create problems.

An easy tool to investigate what content is stored on those partitions is: EASSOS Partition Guru.

It is a small installer and comes in both freeware and commercial versions. The freeware one is fine for investigating.

This software has an explorer-like tool to look inside partitions, even if those do not have a drive letter or are hidden. And if you encounter files on those partitions that are associated with installed applications you can view those normally. Which makes investigating a breeze. The freeware version even allows you to copy files to different partitions or devices.

When you install Windows normally, besides the C:\ partition another small partition is created in front of the C:\ partition that contains all the required boot information. Lose this partition and you lose the ability to boot Windows at all! From that moment you will need to boot from your Windows installation media and see if the repair function can restore this or not.

Common size of this boot partition is 100MByte on a standard hard disk (with spinning platter(s)), and 350MByte on a SSD hard disk. All recovery partitions I have encountered so far, always have been several gigabytes in size. Usually between 4 and 10 GByte, depending on how much trial crap the manufacturer has included in their standard Windows installation. As the MS Windows installation files themselves are around 3GByte in size, drivers for the hardware take up the rest of the minimum recovery partition size of 4GByte.

The Windows disk manager isn't that capable in showing you what the actual purpose is of an partition. You will need more specialist tools for that. The earlier mentioned Partition Guru software is just one of those tools, MiniTool Partition Wizard is another (also comes in both freeware and commercial versions). In any case, what the Windows drive management software appears to mark as recovery partition doesn't have to be recovery partition in reality. The last partition in your screenshot, the one of 9.18GByte, that is the recovery partition of the manufacturer of your PC.

[anandcoral]

Thanks MilesAhead, tomos and Shades for the help.

I am more wiser now. Yes it does not look wise to gain 1/2 Gb with the risk of loosing 100 gb if anything goes wrong. I do not have Win10 clean installation CD, neither image of the hdd. UEFI/GPT is quite different from MBR system, as I found in AOMEI PA to convert between them for re-sizing.

So I have dropped the plan for these partitions. Better safe than sorry.

Actually I wanted to increase the size of my C: drive which is filling up faster now in Win10, but the above small gbs won't help much. Have to think some other ways.

Thanks all once again.

Regards,

Anand

[mouser]

So I have dropped the plan for these partitions. Better safe than sorry.

-anandcoral (September 11, 2015, 11:24 AM)

I think you made a wise decision.

[Shades]

Increasing the size of your C:\ partition can be done...by sacrificing the recovery partition (the one of 9.18GByte).

So if you decide you can live without that, there are 3 ways to go:
1.) Moving all partitions to the end of your hard disk, so the free space gained is now next to the C:\ partition and you can simply extend the C:\ partition.
2.) use the empty space to create a new partition and move the pagefile.sys file there.
3.) use the empty space to mount it with the C:\ partition. NTFS allows for this.


Method 1 is tricky, time-consuming and make sure you have sufficient grid power for as long as this action will take. Also, all this time you cannot use your computer.
Method 2 is easy and the least time-consuming. It would help to configure the page file to have a start size of 8GByte and and end size of 8GByte. That way it won't fragment and the remaining free space on that new partition remains sufficient in size. Enjoy the free space on C:\! Even more space can be gained when you remove the hibernation file by disabling that functionality, but that is something you won't like to do.
Method 3 isn't difficult either, but could be considered intermediate, because of the concepts the user needs to grasp.

[anandcoral]

Thanks Shades for the suggestions.

Can I get any help file, web link etc for the methods 2 and 3 ? They seem interesting and I may try them in case C: nearly fills up.

Regards,

Anand

[Shades]

Method 2.
Disable hibernation.

Method 3.

The Windows OS's being used in these pages may be a bit different than the one you are currently running. However, these methods are practically the same for any of the Windows OS's, so that shouldn't hold you back.

And, in case you are want to know more about method 1, the link explains very basically the concept of how to allocate free space from one partition to another. There is also a hint about moving partitions. The software used at the link is from Aomei, but you don't have to worry, software from other vendors looks and feels practically the same. Personal favorite for this kind of task is MiniTool, but there are many alternatives.

[anandcoral]

Thanks Shades.

These will come handy when needed.

Regards,

Anand