Windows 10: Recovery Partition is 95GB - Why does it consume 1/5th of SSD capacity

Pretty much exactly what the title says. After upgrading from win7 => win10 I migrated over to an Samsung 840EVO ssd with 500gb capacity and before I knew it, the capacity was almost already full. I scaled back some of my media storage to an external HD but I still want to minimize this partition.

Basically, why is this partition so big? Surely a recovery sector doesn't need to be that big... and secondly how to scale this back if its even possible (preferably without having to wipe the drive and re-formatting/partitioning it) Its currently ~100% free.

Thanks in advance for any help!

:)

 

Why wont my Toshiba Satellite S557-A5334 running Windows 10 v. 10586 upgrade? Keep getting error 0xc1900200?

Disk management shows 5 partitions:

Healthy (Recovery partition) 1 GB capacity 1 GB Free space

Healthy (EFI System Partition) 100 MB capacity 100 MB free space

TI10672100G C: 931.36 GB capacity 596.96 GB free

Healthy (Recovery Partition) 856 MB capacity 856 MB free

Healthy (Recovery Partition) 8.10 GB capacity 8.10 GB free

I haven't created any of these partitions, they either were created by the manufacturer or ?? I am running Avast antivirus - is it possible that it has used up the free space in one of the recovery partitions and it just isn't being shown?

 

Extend System Drive but recovery partition is in the way (wanted a command-line built-in solution)

Yes, I get it that you can do this with 3rd party tools.

This has to be one of the most common scenarios out there.

(1) Consumer buys laptop or computer with smallest SSD to avoid markup for bigger SSD.

(2) Consumer buys biggest SSD from Amazon.

(3) Consumer clones disc with delivered partition layout with .5GB recovery unmovable partition just after data partition.

Fixing bootness was a technical conundrum, albeit do-able. I had to weed through tons of "Install this ..." before I found the built-in solution:

bootrec /fixmbr && bootrec /fixboot && bootrec /scanos && bootrec /rebuildbcd

Are there any command-line things I can do to solve this without losing recovery features (and without downloading some Big-Chicken-Dinner tool)?

(move the recovery partition to the end or combine it into my C drive under perhaps C:\Recovery\ as a hidden folder)

[11.72 GB Healthy (Recovery Partition)]

[100 MB Healthy (EFI System Partition)]

[MyComputer (C 226.15 GB NTFS Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)]

[500 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition)] <- This is in the way!

[238.46 GB Unallocated]

 

Can you post a screenshot of Disk Managment please, that will enable people to help you.

 

When you say you 'migrated over to an Samsung 840EVO ssd' what do you mean exactly? You used a disk cloning tool or something like that? What machine is it, are those two partitions without drive letters remnants of a Dell, or other manufacturer, system? Need to know a bit more info in order to tell you what to do safely.

My Win 10 system partitions have around 10-11 GB of used space and if I make a compressed recovery image to USB stick it's around 6-7GB.

 

When I did a reset of Win 10 and let it wipe the disk My Reserved is 16Mb and recovery partition is 450Mb. I think a clean install will be needed to reclaim the space. Note if your using gpt there is another hidden partition at the beginning of the disk called EFI system Partition but that is only 100Mb.

 

Sorry about that Nus, I thought I had updated my account with my specs hence why I didn't post them. So here it is anyway:
Dell Precision M4600
Primary Drive: Samsung SSD 840 EVO (500GB)
2x8GB Kingston DDR3-1333Hz Ram (in primary slots)
Original OS: Windows 7 Pro
Current OS: WIndows 10 Pro

Migration software used was EaseUs free migration (Samsung's migration software wouldn't recognise the Samsung harddrive for some stupid reason)

Migration was from a WD Elements 750GB HD (that was stock on the machine)

The drive in question is Disk0 (obviously) with the C: drive being my primary partition and the others as "System Reserved" and "Recovery Partition (no name)".

The problem is that these other partitions seem bigger than they should be. I do my backups externally. Note that both of the partitions (system reserved and recovery partition) are ~100% free and take up ~95GB each.

I don't want to have to do a fresh install (I have a lot of engineering software that takes ages to install and I have some major papers coming up). Given that I still have the 750GB harddrive with everything on it (just before the migration) could i replace it in the system and re-do the migration to the SSD with corrected settings or is there a faster and more efficient way to resize these partitions (windows doesn't let me, naturally)?

 

Not sure this will be helpful, however I migrated to a SSD with Windows 7 and as soon as the migration was done I swapped out the drives to be in the 0 Sata connector on the MB, meaning I put the SSD where the WD was on the MB and I had no problems.

 

Thanks for the reply, but the issue isnt so much with the SSD working, but with the fact that 2/5ths of my SSD is consumed by empty recovery/system reserved partitions.

 

OK, so just make your sure you have your original image to restore again before you try anything in case it goes tits up!

Obviously a clean install would be the nicest solution as you could just have one full-size partition with everything on but, as you've said, you don't want to do this.

I'd say the Recovery partition is a remnant from Dell and would probably safe to nuke and then that space can be added to your C: partition.

The System Reserved partition does not need to be anywhere near that big, but you can't just go ahead and nuke it as your PC won't boot. You can add the system files to the C: partition and make it bootable , which will allow you to get rid of the System Reserved partition, but this is a bit of a complex process.

So, what I would try is using the Windows Disk Management interface to shrink the System Reserved partition and delete the Recovery partition. You can then reclaim the free disk space by extending your C: partition and/or creating a new partition(s).

Alternatively:

I'm not familiar with the EaseUS software but there might be some options, when restoring the image, to only restore the data, not the empty space.

Looking at the EaseUS site I see they also have a free partition tool that seems to have more advanced capabilities than the Windows tool, i.e. lets you move partitions as well. So, if using Windows Disk Management proves unsatisfactory, have a look at this: Free Resize/Move Partitions - EaseUS Partition Master Guide

 

I had the same problem as the OP. I used Easus Partition Master to reclaim the space. I ran into the same problem while cloning my Win 10 drive to a larger one. I got my space back only after using Partition Master. Still have no idea why a second partition was created during the clone.