Why are Recovery and EFI Partitions on Drive D?

Tomel · 29 Dec 2019

Have an Intel NUC in which I installed an M.2 drive and a SSD which I use just for storage. I installed Windows 10 on the M.2 drive. I did not install anything initially on the SSD.

The Disk Management Utility shows 3 partitions on my boot (M.2) drive. The main partition and a partition named Recovery plus a partition called EFI System. I understand the reason for these three partitions on my main boot drive which contains the Windows 10 operating system.

However, I see these same three partitions on my SSD. Why? What's the purpose? How did they get placed on the SSD? I know I can remove them and expand the main partition to take all of the disk space using diskpart. However, I don't want to do this if these extra partitions serve some useful purpose or are necessary for some reason.

Can anybody clarify this for me? Thanks.

Megahertz · 29 Dec 2019

The three partitions are only needed on a boot able drive. The drive once had Win 10.

To remove them you must clean the disk. EVERYTHING will be deleted on the disk

Open a CMD window as Administrator and type:
diskpart (to enter diskpart)
list disk (take note of the number assigned to the disk you want to clean)
select disk x (replace x with the drive number you found above)
clean
exit (to exit diskpart)
exit (to exit CMD)

Open disk manager (C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc). The disk will be with only one unallocated partition. Create one or more partitions (Choose GPT style) and assign the desired letters to them.

Tomel · 29 Dec 2019

Thanks. Cleaned up the drive w/no problems or issues.

I did find one piece of info that might benefit others while I was researching this topic. diskpart gives two "clean" options: clean and clean all. If you want a secure erase of the drive because you are disposing or selling it, use clean all. Clean all writes info to each sector and is considered a secure erase.

Megahertz · 29 Dec 2019

Good. Please mark this thread as Solved