Resizing the Recovery partition

I recently restored a 1 /12 year old Macrium image that had seven OS related partitions



I removed the redundant recovery partitions and extended the OS partition to incorporate the leftover empty space





I don't know what accounted for the size discrepancy, compared to the others, at the time that 874mb partition was created, but since it was the latest recovery partition, that's the reason I retained it in favor of the earlier ones.

Everything seem to be working ok, but that partition has 365.5mb free space. Is there any harm shaving all or part of that free space off?

hsehestedt said:

Follow-up: Technically you could shrink that partition a little bit, but you won't be able to add that space to the Windows partition unless you use a third-party program. The problem is that you will likely end up in the same boat again when you upgrade Windows where a whole new recovery partition gets created.

Hi hsehestedt,

Due to various issue, that I once again found it necessary to restore an earlier Macrium image, that has 7 partitions



Is there any risk of simply disposing of partitions 8 & 9, by restoring the image without including those two partitions?

kitpzyxmsir said:

Hi hsehestedt,

Due to various issue, that I once again found it necessary to restore an earlier Macrium image, that has 7 partitions



Is there any risk of simply disposing of partitions 8 & 9, by restoring the image without including those two partitions?

Run following from admin command prompt:

Code:

reagentc /disable

This parks winre.wim

Then just restore partitions 2, 6, 7.

Then you can expand C drive to fill space.

Then run following from admin command prompt:

Code:

reagentc /enable

and winre.wim is in path C:\recovery

Restore this pc is now active.

You could keep one of the recovery partition e.g. 3 as largest, and use reagentc commands to make that active but tbh more hassle than the benefit.


@NavyLCDR beat me to it as I was typing.

NavyLCDR said:

There is a small issue with the order that you are suggesting doing things in. Running reagentc /disable will only disable recovery environment in the existing and running Windows 10/11. Then you suggest restoring the previous Windows 10/11 from a backup image. That backup image will still have the recovery environment set to a specific partition because you never ran reagentc /disable on it.

That is similar to changing my background desktop photo. I can change it now on the Windows 10/11 installed, but if I restore a previous image, my desktop background photo is going to revert back to what I had saved in the image.

You are correct. You would have to run reagentc /disable, then backup C drive. Easier to just disable, then use minitool or similar to delete partitions an recover space.

I'm trying to learn as I go here. I appreciate your patience.

Just curious, if partitions 2, 6, 7 are the only ones necessary, why couldn't I, using Macrium, simply restore/replace that seven partition space with just those three, and then just resize partition 7? What exactly is that large a partition 3 for? I thought it was needed for the boot recovery menu?