Which recovery partitions and folders can safely be removed?

v1903 installed on a ~256GB MBR disk.

Code:

C:\Recovery    [folder]     4.86 GB used
<unnamed>      [partition]   534 MB      "Healthy, (Recovery Partition)"
Recovery Image [partition] 11.72 GB      "Healthy, (Primary Partition)"

I'm hoping to tidy up this hard drive.
Please could someone indicate which if any of the above three items can be removed.
I'm fairly certain the small Recovery Partition can be deleted, but I haven't been able to find much about the Recovery Image partition.
Thanks!

Thank you very much!

Is there any straightforward way to move the small "Recovery partition" to the end of the disk,
or to delete it, define a dummy partition leaving enough free space at the end, and recreate the Recovery partition so that it is at the end of the disk?

For deletion, I'm familiar with DISKPART's "delete partition override" command!

Thanks you for the interesting links.

With youthful (well, geriatric) enthusiasm I deleted the "Recovery Image" partition, which I determined to be empty by assigning it a drive letter, and got AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to move the "Recovery Partition" to the very end of free space in the drive - a very easy process with this program. No objections. Yet.

Will try that on Monday, when I'm back at work!

Hi there

@JohnGray

usually the EFI partition is tiny (around 80 - 100MB) -- you need that one for UEFI and there's often a tiny reserved partition on a GPT drive of 16MB -- in the scheme of things just leave those while you can remove any recovery or additional partitions (Not the OS one of course) -- TAKE A DISK IMAGE FIRST -- there's plenty of FREE software to do that.

BTW if there's a separate boot (not the EFI) partition you can also delete that -- but then you'll need to boot with someting like Macrium in stand alone recovery mode -- i.e from a bootable USB etc and then choose fix windows boot problems -- this will then re-create the boot record and should incorporate it into the main OS partition. However again a boot partition is really tiny (usually) so not worth the aggro of deleting it.

If you need to recover the OS - I find it's much better to restore from a Macrium disk image backup than bother with recovery partitions or using Repair windows types of things. If you don't like Macrium there are other backup / restore programs out there but a load of people on these Forums use and like Macrium --probably the most popular backup software -- at least on this Forum.

Macrium also seems better than the rest if you do run into Windows boot problems -- boot from the recovery media and again choose fix windows boot problems. (This feature also available with the FREE Version).

Cheers
jimbo

@jimbo: unfortunately, the first line of my original post indicated that my question refers to an MBR disk. No EFI anywhere, thank goodness!

JohnGray said:

@jimbo: unfortunately, the first line of my original post indicated that my question refers to an MBR disk. No EFI anywhere, thank goodness!

Hi there
no difference whether MBR or GPT -- if your computer can handle UEFI I'd change it -- you don't lose any data

go into in admin cmd mode DISKPART

then LIST DISK

then select Disk
choose the one xxx that Disk part shows your Windows is on
and the type convert GPT

then exit and re-boot

Cheers
jimbo