THREE Recovery partitions?

You can delete partitions 4 and 5. Then with mini-tool partition magic you can move partition 3 all the way to the left and expand C to get the extra 900MB.

As @Word Man says you should have a 16MB MSR partition between partitions 2 and 3. I'm a bit vague on what this is for. MS says it is for "future use" or some such thing Windows and GPT FAQ - Windows 10 hardware dev

I'd leave it for now if your system is OK - if it causes a problem in future you can think about it then. If you did want to do it now you would have to delete partitions 4 and 5, move partition 3 all the way to the left, expand C to use all of the unallocated space except 16mb, then move C all the way to the left. Then make a MSR in the 16MB unallocated space which would then exist between partitions 1 and 2 and finally re-register WinRE in partition 4. It is certainly possible but a bit fiddly.

Thanks, I'll let you know what happens!

Hi,

My C:/ drive (SSD) has always been labeled #2...I have no idea why.

Quite likely because the sata cables are reversed.

Windows setup recreates a Recovery partition each time a new OS install is done. It leaves the old recovery partition(s) alone as it "thinks" they may be needed should you decide to roll back the new OS to a previous version.

Cheers,

AH...probably true!

Partitions deleted and C:/ expanded. Thanks guys!

lx07 said:

You can delete partitions 4 and 5. Then with mini-tool partition magic you can move partition 3 all the way to the left and expand C to get the extra 900MB.
and finally re-register WinRE in partition 4. It is certainly possible but a bit fiddly.

Sorry to bust into this thread at such a later date, but I am in this exact position and I am hoping not to make you go through all the same motions. In my case I had the 495MB partition labelled as "recovery partition" sitting in between the space allocated for my C drive and a bunch of unallocated space, and I wanted to use the unallocated as part of my C drive. So I used Mini Tool Partition Wizard to move the recovery partition to the right of unallocated space so the unallocated was adjacent to C drive. Then I extended C drive. Now I have the following in disk management (left to right) : 100MB System Reserved, 222GB C drive, 1.1GB unallocated space, and finally on the right is 495MB Recovery partition.

This is all how I wanted it to be, only the problem is now when I run an elevated command of reagent /info, I get Windows RE status disabled. And when I type the command reagent /enable, I get: The Windows RE image was not found. How do I re-register to let Windows know where to find the recovery partition. It is partition 3 of disk 0. That is also what it was called before I moved things around. Thanks for helping.

spacecon said:

How do I re-register to let Windows know where to find the recovery partition. It is partition 3 of disk 0.

Firstly please check with diskpart it is 3 not 4 as you may have a small MSR partition which is not shown in disk management between system and C. From elevated command prompt:

Code:

diskpart
select disk 0
list partition

Identify which partition is for RE by looking at the size (it will be either 3 or 4 - I'll assume 4 here) then still in diskpart:

Code:

select partition 4
assign letter=T

Then in file explorer you'll see T drive mapped. Check it doesn't look empty from properties (the Recovery directory is hidden system directory so you'd need to show hidden files and unhide system files in file explorer view to see it - there is no need - if the partition properties looks something like this then that will do).



From another elevated command prompt register the image and check.

Code:

Reagentc /setreimage /path T:\Recovery\WindowsRE /target C:\Windows
Reagentc /info

If it worked then back in diskpart

Code:

remove letter=T
exit

More detailed steps can be found here Deploy Windows RE but you need to check the drive letters (you want to use C not W for the windows directory as you have an existing install).

Let us know if you have a problem.

lx07 said:

Let us know if you have a problem.

Thank you very much for the help. I did run into a problem. I have to apologize that I am so illiterate in disk management. I ran into problems, but now it is working, but I do not know for sure how/why and also I have some questions.

I followed the instructions up through naming T partition and looking for it in file explorer. File explorer said the drive could not be accessed, it was not ready. At command prompt I got a similar response when trying to access T:. I went into MiniTool Partition Wizard and I could explore the partition and it looked reasonable. Out of desperation and not knowing what I was doing, I thought maybe the unallocated space between the C drive and the recovery partition might be a problem (at that point, the recovery partition was all the way on the right). So I moved the unallocated space to the far right, so that the recovery partition was just to the right of C drive, adjacent to it, and the unallocated space was on the far right. At that point I rebooted and then the recovery environment appeared to be working because when I did a command for reagent /info it told me RE status is enabled. So that is good, but I am totally lost as to what made it work, because as a test I once again put unallocated space between the C drive partition and the recovery partition to see if now it would no longer work again. But it still appears to be working even with the space between them, so apparently that was not the problem after all. So I have no idea, but I would like to understand because surely I will run into this again.

Along those same lines, I have a question about moving partitions. Earlier in this thread you told the OP to move the recovery partition all the way to the left so that he could extend the C drive into the unallocated spaces to the right. But to do that, he would have to move the recovery to the left side of C drive partition. How do you do that? I would like to move mine so that it is to the left of C drive, but I cannot figure how to do it. It only lets me move partitions to the left or right if there is unallocated space adjacent. Thanks for the help, and please pardon my ignorance.

I can't really understand what you are saying with that huge block of text.

I did try to read it several times it but I can't understand it. I get confused by left and right (I have a small mole on my left wrist to help).

The partition layout should look like this (ideally)



Configure UEFI/GPT-Based Hard Drive Partitions

It doesn't really matter if they are in a different order long as all the partitions exist and are correctly defined.

Sorry I was too wordy. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it hurts. This is what I have now and it is working now. What I am wondering is if there is a way to move the recovery partition over to the left before C, adjacent to the System Reserved partition? You had told someone to do that, but I don't know how. If so, how? Or is that not a good thing to do? Thanks.