Win 10 Explorer No Longer Shows Recovery Partition

Notebook came with 2 internal drives. One an HDD platter and the other a speedy SSD PCI Express NVMe. Shortly after purchase in Dec of last year I used the media creation tool and downloaded the win 10 iso and installed it on the HDD platter which allowed me to dual boot either from the HDD or the SSD. Both drives on their respective boot ups show the C and D drives along with the Recovery partition. This past weekend I removed the slow HDD platter and put in a slightly more speedy SAMSUNG EVO 860. Prior to doing that I imaged the C drive the one with the SSD PCI Express NVMe and included all three of the partitions of the drive in the backup, the healthy large boot drive, the 200MB first drive as well as the 1GB Recovery partition. The imaging was successful and I can still dual boot and the EVO is much much faster than the HDD platter as expected. The only slight hiccup when I boot now from either the original SSD PCI Express NVMe or the EVO 860 I no longer see the recovery partition in explorer. It does show up however in disk management but I see no way to make it visible again. This is not a deal breaker but I just like seeing it there in explorer.

I looked at this page:

https://www.disk-partition.com/artic...tion-5740.html

..and tried this suggestion ->In most cases, the recovery partition is hidden by default in case of unintentional deletion and formation, and you can’t see the recovery partition in Windows Explorer (File Explorer), the only way you can see the partition at that time is Disk Management. Just go: This PC>Manage to open Computer Management, then select Storage> Disk Management.

But did not see any way to unhide it. The other two suggestion diskpart and AOMEI I would like to avoid if possible. Thanks in advance.

Berton said:

To see a partition on a drive or a drive itself in File Explorer or the older Windows Explorer it is necessary that a drive letter be assigned to it, usually in Disk Management. I have seen the downside of having a drive letter assigned to smallish partitions [that really shouldn't be necessary] is the persistent warnings of low disk space.

Right. Right. I have to use that "trick" on an older win 7 notebook whenever I hook up an external docking station and load it up with drives for storage. The docking station works just fine but every time I need to go into disk management and assign the external drives in the docking station a drive letter so that they show up in explorer. All I need to do is right click the drive and assign it a letter and it pops up in explorer. Screenshot 25 is what I see if I right click the C drive and have the opportunity to change the drive letter. However Screenshot 26 when I right click it shows only a HELP dialog box opening up for the Recovery partition and no opportunity to change or add a drive letter.

Berton said:

I see the same thing on OEM computers, usually something the OEMs did to allow a Factory Restore which resets the computer to the condition the day it was shipped. The computers I built don't have that.

What would be your best "guesstimate" on why simply replacing and then adding a second internal hard drive in this case replacing the HDD platter with an EVO 860 would suddenly make the recovery partition "disappear" from the explorer window? TIA.

P.S. I have not booted into the Evo 860 this morning to see if the recovery partitions are visible there but even if they are (which at this point I doubt) that would not explain why the recovery partition is no longer visible from the boot drive of the SSD PCI Express NVMe when it was visible prior to switching out the HDD platter. Thanks.