Here's what disk management tells me:
How to merge the first and last partitions and free up the excess one?
Yes I know it's "only" 0.5GB, but the OCD part of me wants to sort it out
David
Without first one you wouldn't be able to BOOT. to windows and you just can't merge two partitions that are not next to each other. Restore/recovery partition you can get rid of and merge with C: but will have to BOOT from somewhere else. Windows won't let you do anything with partition it's running of.
Download GParted Live - MajorGeeks can be used as live OS to boot from but you are going to make a full system backup first, aren't you ?
When I said merge, I meant a logical merge not a physical one. The last partition on the drive was created at one of the Windows 10 version updates when it decided the original 500MB (or so) one wasn't big enough - its the recovery partition. I think it was enlarged again when I installed 1903.
Clearly if you can move stuff from the System Startup partition to a new separate recovery partition, then it must also be possible to increase the size of the startup partition and merge the stuff back in?
D.
"The stuff" has never been on System Reserved partition.
System Reserved is the boot partition on MBR disks. It has nothing to do with recovery partition, which contains data and tools for system recovery. The recovery partition, depending on Windows version and install / deployment method, is labelled OEM, WinRE or Recovery.
The data on these two partitions cannot be put on one single partition, both having their specific purpose. You can delete the recovery partition if you want to, but in doing so, you will lose system recovery options. In addition, it would be recreated next time you upgrade Windows. I see no point in deleting it and free that 0.2% of your disk space it currently uses.
It is recommended to leave the recovery partition as it is, let Windows take care of it. At some point, a future upgrade might need to expand that partition to update recovery tools. This is done automatically, upgrade process shrinks the preceding C: partition and takes a few MBs of its space. If upgrade does not find an existing recovery partition, it will re-create it after the C: drive.
Kari
Hi there
You can actually remove it if you wish to go back to MBR boot where you can have a single partition containing boot and the windows OS -- you have to do that manually though as Windows install / upgrade if it sees any HDD space will create extra partitions for boot. -- I wouldn't bother though as it's more trouble than its worth and it's such a tiny amount of Disk space -- you've probably got far more junk such as unwanted files / internet cookies and temporary data all elsewhere on HDD anyway.
Cheers
jimbo
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