How to merge old recovery partition with C Drive?

Hi everyone,

Having an absolute nightmare trying to figure out how to merge 500Mb of old recovery partition space to my main C Drive partition.

I have deleted the recovery partition after checking it was the old and not current recovery. This has now left me with the relevant unallocated space.

However, no matter what programme I use, I can't seem to merge it with my C drive partition. All the tutorials I see online show the unallocated space to the right hand side adjacent of the C drive and mine is to the left.

Can someone please help?

Thanks in advance.

see pictures below from both windows disk manager and Aomei

that would change the start sector of the os partition. It can be done by 3rd party partition managers by booting into a pre os phase or winpe.

you would need to move the msr partition to the left first, so it is adjacent to the 99mb esp.

it is not worth the bother , no harm in leaving that small amount of unallocated space where it is.

SIW2 said:

that would change the start sector of the os partition. It can be done by 3rd party partition managers by booting into a pre os phase or winpe.

you would need to move the msr partition to the left first, so it is adjacent to the esp.

it is not worth the bother , no harm in leaving that small amount of unallocated space where it is.

So is the only way to do this in a reliable way, to do a fresh install? Not gonna go down that route but in the future if I used the same SSD, that would do the trick? There's no quick and easy method to simply merge the unused space with my C drive (I know I'm prob oversimplifying this)

So is the only way to do this in a reliable way, to do a fresh install?

no, that would be silly, a waste of time and a lot of unnecessary writing to the ssd.

In this case it is only 500mb unallocated spce, I suggest leaving it alone.

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If there was a larger amount , then:

immediately on the left of your os partition is a 16mb msr partition.



it is in the way

if that was deleted or moved then a 3rd party partitioner would allow resizing the os partition into the unalloacted space on its left. But it cannot be done from within windows.

the partition manager would request to reboot into winpe.

SIW2 said:

no, that would be silly, a waste of time and a lot of unnecessary writing to the ssd.

In this case it is only 500mb unallocated spce, I suggest leaving it alone.

****************************************************************************

If there was a larger amount , then:

immediately on the left of your os partition is a 16mb msr partition.



it is in the way

if that was deleted or moved then a 3rd party partitioner would allow resizing the os partition into the unalloacted space on its left. But it cannot be done from within windows.

the partition manager would request to reboot into winpe.

Thanks for the explanation. Last question. What is that 16mb msr partition? Is this to allow for windows update to always work? If I was to delete it, would I be able to create a new one after a merge? (I'm prob not going to do this but out of interest)

If I was to delete it, would I be able to create a new one after a merge?

yes

At one point microsoft seemed to insist on it, yet apparently their own tool for mbr>gpt conversion does not create one.

It is not needed for booting or normal function of the os

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...iew=windows-11

Thanks guys! Appreciate the advice and knowledge