Safe procedure to Remove Old Recovery Partition at beginning of Disk

Win7ine · 28 Nov 2020

What is the best procedure (ideally without 3d party Soft) to remove an old, unused Recovery Partition which sits
at the beginning of the Disk and then move the rest of the existing partitions left to the beginning of the disk.
Winver 20H2 19042.630

Safe procedure to Remove Old Recovery Partition at beginning of Disk-image.png

Ghot · 28 Nov 2020

@Win7ine

Download EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.0 for Windows - OldVersion.com

Scanned at Virustotal: VirusTotal

NavyLCDR · 28 Nov 2020

Because it is at the front of the drive, you cannot do it with Windows alone. You must use a third party partitioning tool. You are also going to find that there is a small Microsoft System Reserved Partition that will be in the way at the front of the drive as well. I recommend MiniTool Partition Wizard Free:
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Wizard Free

Steve C · 29 Nov 2020

I've also used MiniTool Partition Wizard Free to do this. I prefer to use the portable version since the full installer can cause a false Defender detection. Be sure to make a full system backup before you fiddle with partitions.

Win7ine · 29 Nov 2020

So it seems restoring select partitions EFI, MS16MB, WIN, RECOVERY from an external Backup omitting the first old WINRECOVERY is the way forward as moving partitions left would also likely take longer (Read/Write operations on same physical drive).
Then after restore, I guess WINRE needs to be reinitialized with REAGENTC ... as the partition number will have changed.

Bastet · 29 Nov 2020

+1 for EaseUS partition manager. However this will leave you with a blank partition at the beginning of the drive which cannot be moved due to system reserved partition.
My thought to circumvent this would be to use Macrium to drag & drop the partitions from left to right - system reserved. C/Windows. First recovery partition & then the last recovery partition. Then use EaseUS to remove the old recovery which will leave the blank space to extend the C partition into.
I personally have not tried this but theoretically it should work.

Win7ine · 29 Nov 2020

So in the end I created a bootable GPARTED Live USB stick with Rufus (Portable),
deleted the old, unwanted first Recovery partition on the very left of the drive,
moved all others left one by one.
Rebooted off WIN10 USB stick (created with Media Creation tool) into Command interface to check volumes
are assigned the right drive letters (especially C:) with DISKPART and then recreated BCD store with
BCDBOOT C:\Windows.

All working as expected.

Ztruker · 29 Nov 2020

Win7ine said:

So in the end I created a bootable GPARTED Live USB stick with Rufus (Portable),
deleted the old, unwanted first Recovery partition on the very left of the drive,
moved all others left one by one.
Rebooted off WIN10 USB stick (created with Media Creation tool) into Command interface to check volumes
are assigned the right drive letters (especially C:) with DISKPART and then recreated BCD store with
BCDBOOT C:\Windows.

All working as expected.

You could have done exactly the same thing using Minitool Partition Wizard from Windows. It would have rebooted when necessary, made the changes then booted back to windows.

Win7ine · 30 Nov 2020

Ztruker said:

You could have done exactly the same thing using Minitool Partition Wizard from Windows. It would have rebooted when necessary, made the changes then booted back to windows.

Perhaps, but this way I did not have to install any 3d party software that hooks into the system and leaves unwanted residue after you want to get rid of it.

Paul Black · 30 Nov 2020

Hello @Win7ine,

Win7ine said:

Perhaps, but this way I did not have to install any 3d party software that hooks into the system and leaves unwanted residue after you want to get rid of it.

The built-in uninstall process [ Minitool Partition Wizard ] is pretty good. You could always use Revo Uninstaller [ widely used by members ] that runs the software built-in uninstall operation first, and then scans for leftover items.

I hope this helps.