Hello,
Just a question: I had installed a new NVME SSD in my machine, starting from scratch. Created a USB thumb drive with Win10 installation media on it.
Now that everything has completed (drivers, updates, essential software for me), I notice that I have two recovery partitions. Why is that and is that normal ?
Often happens when an update requires larger recovery partition than the original. It creates a new one.
It can also happen when Upgrading to a newer version of Windows rather than with a clean install.
It seems to me that you didn't clean the drive during installation as a recovery on the beginning of the drive was the default on very old Win 10 versions. Also the new one is small (new WinRE requires a recovery partition at least 850M. I suggest 1G).
During POST, press F12(?) to launch the boot menu. You will see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name). Select USB UEFI (Name) to install as UEFI-GPT.
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the main drive till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.
To make a bigger recovery partition::
- Disable the recovery environment on the partition: run reagentc /disable
- With AOMEI partition shrink the C: partition in 450M and enlarge the Recovery partition to the left using all unallocated space.
- Restart
- Enable the the recovery environment on the partition: run reagentc /enable
- Check the recovery environment on the partition: run reagentc /info
OK, so there can be multiple reasons why this occurred. I assume I indeed used an older Win10 installation media and then had it update itself to the latest.
Now as far as getting everything nice and neat again without formatting or deleting partitions again; I understand from your explanations that the recovery partition is too small.
But I'm still left a bit clueless here. On the screenshot (in Dutch though) there's one marked "herstel" (the top one). Herstel means recovery in Dutch.
The bottom one, with the exclamation mark next to it, is nearly full (hence the mark).
Since the top one barely holds any data, I'm confused now. Shouldn't the recovery data from the bottom one be migrated or something to the (enlarged) top one ?
TIA
No. As you (rather oddly) chose to use an old build (presumably a really old one where the Recovery partition was placed first) as was the case when those builds were upgraded to one where MS (much more sensibly) placed the Recovery partition last, the first partition is now entirely redundant.
You can delete that - as it's not large, you could just leave it at that- or you could use a 3rd party partition manager to move partitions as necessary and extend into the unallocated space made available by deleting that partition.
In note form: using a 3rd party partition manager e.g. Minitool Partition Wizard
- delete 1st Recovery partition.
- move next 2 left
- extend your Windows partition left into the unallocated space.
Naturally you would first take due precautions.
The routine and regularly use of 3rd party disk imaging is endlessly recommended here eg. Macrium Reflect (Free is still available) or one of the others + large enough external storage for image file sets.
OK, understood.
But you're sure that I can safely delete the top (first) one ? Because it is marked as "Recovery" by the 3rd party software (AMOEI) while the other one (bottom/last) is not ?
I can take a Macrium Image of the whole disk so I can revert to current state if anything goes wrong, but would obviously really hate the hassle, hence my reserve
So take the steps @Megahertz described, and adding to that the deletion of the partition at the beginning + resizing/moving everything so it all aligns again, right ?
Many thanks already!
What I suggested is much simpler than Megahertz's post - simply modifying what you have.
But feel free to do a complete clean install if you wish with a current build- which is what Megahertz suggests.
It's easy to find out which is your current Recovery partition- posted many times on tenforums and elsewhere.
As for using disk imaging- you're looking at that the wrong way round.
Why you need that (at least the most basic reason- there are others) is for disaster recovery.
E.g. your mistake; unrecoverable situation; disk failure; unbootable PC etc.
And that needs to be kept up to date- i.e. repeated using e.g. differential imaging.
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