Why Two Recovery Partitions??

bro67 said:

Sorry but not rude, just stating that you are beating a dead horse and you are sweating over something that is a nothing. This has been this way since Microsoft started to change how Windows 8 going into 10 would use partitioning to keep the OS safe from user habits.

It isn't nothing. OS disk sizes are big enough that it makes sense to split them into two partitions, one for the OS and one for other things. That way you can do an image backup of the OS of a smaller size and time. The trouble is that these recovery partitions get wedged in-between, and feature updates eat away at the OS partition size to make room for them.

Recovery Partitions are rather useless in Windows 10. All they contain is the advanced troubleshooting menu that you get when you hold down Shift and click on Restart. That's all it does in Windows 10. You can delete every Recovery Partition on your hard drive and you would never notice anything broken until you wanted to do a system reset, or use the advanced recovery menu to set up booting from a USB flash drive (which has never worked on any of my computers anyway) or reboot into UEFI setup. All off the functions provided by the Recovery Partition(s) are also provided by booting into a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive.

What reagentc /info is telling you is the path to the WinRE.wim file that Windows reboots into when you enter the Advanced Recovery menu by holding down shift and clicking on restart. Delete the partition that reagent /info says the WinRE.wim file is in and you just get reduced functionality from the Advanced Recovery menu. That WinRE.wim file and a couple of very small housekeeping files like reagent.xml is all that is in the Windows 10 Recovery partition. All the system files that are used to do a Reset of Windows, in Windows 10 are contained in the WinSXS folder under Windows.

Before Windows 10, the system files used to reset the Windows installation were actually contained in the Recovery Partition(s) which is why those partitions would be several GB in size.

If you delete the partition that reagentc /info is pointing to, this is what you get:

Code:

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.16299.19]
(c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

    Windows RE status:         Disabled
    Windows RE location:
    Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 668387ed-ad21-11e7-b98a-a264a63b44cf
    Recovery image location:
    Recovery image index:      0
    Custom image location:
    Custom image index:        0

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

Consequently, the posts stating "you don't have two recovery partitions" and "don't delete that first one!" are pretty much just misinformation. Now, if you delete a factory recovery partition that is several GB in size and is from Windows 8 or earlier, then you will be losing the ability to do a factory restore back to the previous OS - which was probably broken by Windows 10 anyway.

Josey Wales said:

I use legacy bios so I have no worries about which recovery partition to delete.

Legacy BIOS v.UEFI has nothing to do with it.

cereberus said:

I think it might behave differently when the 4 primary partition limit is reached. I seem to remember it working slightly differently, but cannot remember off top of my head how.

But, if there is a recovery partion already existing, legacy BIOS v UEFI has no bearing on whether to delete it or not.