Windows 10: Multiple Recovery Partitions After Windows 10 upgrade, Need help?

Windows 10 went ahead and installed without my permission on my Dell laptop. I wasn't ready to upgrade, yet. The install finished, I looked it over and decided I needed to roll back to 8.1. I did this and now I have multiple recovery partitions and barely any disk space left on my computer. My questions. I need to know what partitions to merge and which ones to leave alone, and if this is still possible to do. Will this give me extra space on hard drive.. I know one partition is for Dell, not sure which one that is. And, I may upgrade later to 10, will it force this situation again? What is best program to do partition merge? Thanks for assistance.




:)

 

Windows 10 & Too many Recovery partitions

A number of discussions have been started on the many Recovery partitions with Windows 10.

I have installed a number of computers with Windows 10, some of them through upgrade from Windows 7.

All the product keys for these Win 7/10 OS were/are of course known to me because I purchased the product keys.

All the installations show the System Reserved partition and the Windows 10 OS partition, nothing else. There are no UEFI partitions.

When I want to re-install Win 10 from scratch it is no problem, even when I deleted all the partitions during the process of (re-)installing Win 10. I do not even have to tell the system the product key because after finalizing the installation, Windows
10 tells me it is activated.

When you see a Recovery partition, then in my opinion, it is there because the operating system came pre-installed and without a CD/DVD (Recovery disk). The Recovery partition is then needed in case of crash.

I have a laptop that came with Windows 8 and that I upgraded to Windows 10. It has 4 Recovery partitions and that puzzles me. I could understand 3: one for Win 8, one for Win 8.1 and one for Win 10. But the fourth?

One day I will re-install Win 10 and not through the Recovery partition (whichever of the 4 it is). I will delete all partitions except the UEFI partition as I am not sure what the consequences are after deleting... It is said that it is needed for booting
the computer correctly (but I thought that is what the BIOS was for).

Again, as several questions regarding multiple Recovery partitions have been raised in several threads, it would be nice if someone with knowledge would explain the origin of multiple Recovery partitions and if they are all needed.

Willy

 

Can hard-drive space used for recovery partitions be reclaimed after upgrade to Windows 10?

Windows 10 on a GPT disk (UEFI boot mode enabled), it does create a EFI, MRS(won't show in Disk Management), Recovery, and C: drive. When you upgrade Windows 8.1 to 10, Windows 10 will create a recovery partition if your system reserved partition (MBR
disk) or Recovery Partition doesn't have enough disk space. As you know, Windows can only shrink a partition from the right side, so the 450 MB recovery partition is new created, which should not be deleted if you want to use recovery options. You need
to keep the 450MB recovery partition if you want to use recovery options. the 750MB recovery belongs to previous version of Windows, so it is useless. the 40 MB and 7.91 GB, which allows you to recover your computer to factory default by pressing a specific
key, was created by system supplier. if you have a Windows 10 installation disc, you can delete both recovery partitions. To see more details, you can read: The
Recovery Partition After Upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 7/8

 

The recovery partition created by Windows 10 is 1/2 GB (500mb). It's not any recovery partition that Windows 10 created that is taking up more than about 1/20th of 1% of your hard drive space.

I would recommend you run a thorough disc cleanup using option 2 here:
Disk Cleanup - Open and Use in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums[/url

All of the recovery partitions combined in your screenshot make up about 1.8% of your hard drive space.

 

I would still like to know which partitions are which and the ones I could safely merge.
Thanks

 

OK. You can safely merge all the partitions that are not the first EFI System partition or the OS C: drive partition.

 

Not sure what that means. Can you point them out and list them from the diagram? Secondly, would partition software know which ones to safely merge? thanks

 

Leave the partitions and disk alone...

 

Recovery partitions are not that important n Windows 8.1 as you only need two partitions ie. the EFI and the main OS partition.

Create a usb recovery drive using control panel, recovery, create recovery drive and select to copy the compressed OS partitition.

You can also uses a tool like Macrium Reflect Free to make an image backup of your pc.

You cannot merge recovery partitions, but you can delete them. The only two you might want to keep are the last two 8 GB ones as they are obviously original vendor supplied partitions.

Personally, I would delete them too if you make the image backup I suggested earlier.

If you delete the partitions before the C drive, you will get unallocated space, and then you would need to move the C partition to the left using a tool like minitool partition wizard free, then expand partition to the right to fill up the unallocatd space creted to the right (plus space from deleted partitions).

It is pretty hard to really mess it up unless you delete the EFI or C drive partition, but I stress again, and image backup is a good plan.

 

it appears you have a 1TB Hybrid drive - 8GB Cache

the last partition on disk 0 is the factory recovery image partition...
the 466MB just before that partition is the windows 10 recovery tools partition..
the 40MB partition is the Dell Diagnostics partition...
And all the other partitions where oversized by OEM...

Again you should consider leaving the disk and partitions alone...
Based on the size of the HDD, you stand to gain a very small percentage of extra storage space...

 

Thanks for all your advice!