Windows 10: THREE Recovery partitions?

Thank you! That is what I was missing. I had to use copy instead of move (don't know why, but I am OK with that). I have successfully gotten things in the recommended order and everything is working. Pointless as it may seem, I am now happy and I feel I learned a little bit. And now I can shrink/expand the used part of the drive easily. Thank you for you help, I really appreciate it.

 

Thank you all very much for the help. Everything is working great, but I have a few questions and comments. These are only for understanding and learning, not to change anything. As stated previously, please forgive my ignorance.

1. In Disk Management, it shows all the partitions but it does not tell you the number of each. Are they labelled from lowest to highest going from left to right? If not, how can you tell which partition is which?

2. In an attempt to figure out which partition was which, I used diskpart, selected the disk and told it to list partitions. It listed in this order: partition 0, partition4, partition 1, partition2, partition3, and gave sizes of each. I do not understand why it listed this order, or what it means. Two of the partitions were the exact same size (since I had copied one of them from the other), so I still could not tell which number corresponded to which partition in Disk Management (or minitool either).

Thanks.

Thanks.

 

1. That's what I would expect. However, an MSR if you have one, won't show in Disk Management - so numbering would have to account for that.

2. Did you use "list par" or "list vol" ? Have never seen "list par" show them in other than numerical order myself.

 

Recovery partition size may change over time from Windows version to version, build to build, or I guess whenever MS deems appropriate. Normally their default size is changed accordingly for Windows install and, if the existing is not big enough, it'll create a new one.

Restore points are in the hidden System Volume Information folder, not in the recovery partition.

 

Thanks everyone for the help. Everything is the way I want it now and working properly. I got rid of the extra unallocated spaces, and this is what it looks like now in Disk Management.





And this is what I get in diskpart. Note the out of sequence, which is trying to tell me something, but not sure what. Also don't know why it is listing a partition that no longer exists?

 

Ugh! I would be nervous about this myself. Looks shady. In this particular case, I would: 1) do a complete disk image to external drive with Macrium Reflect (Free will work), 2) do a clean install of Windows 10, deleting ALL partitions using the "Custom" option, and then 3) restore the imaged 222 GB C: partition to the corresponding slot on the target disk. (ETA: conceptual credit for this suggestion to topgundcp, just feeding back some learnings I've gotten from that member).

But maybe that's just me. I wouldn't expect that overlap of an "Extended" partition (at offset 992 KB) with a Recovery partition starting at offset 1024 KB. Entirely too wonky for me! ALso - I'm a bit leary of ESP being reduced from 100 MB to 99 MB, not sure if that is significant, though.

At worst, after 1) - 3) above, you'll have to re-enable the correct WinRE partition using "reagentc /enable" for starters.

What kind of output do you get from "reagentc /info" at a command prompt at this time?

 

Totally agree - this is asking for trouble. If it was me I would try your MRF suggestion as well. I have done similar before and it worked.

The silly thing is that this was totally unnecessary, and now it looks a mess. OP is lucky the main OS partition has not been corrupted.

Sorry OP - you have probably got lucky and will be able to recover, but from my viewpoint, it is rather frustrating that you did not listen (or understand?) to our advice, and you seemed to have a burning desire to move partitions around for no reason ie you seemed to have got it into your head that partitions needed to be in a specific order.

Of course, experimenting and doing is part of the learning curve, but the most valuable lesson is that you should ALWAYS make an image backup before messing around with partitions.

 

There's some confusion in this thread.
The original thread starter was using a GPT disk type and the partition layout is correctly shown in post #19.
@spacecon,
The partition scheme in your PC is using MBR disk type and they are completely different between the 2's and yet people are still talking about MSR partition which only exists in GPT disk type.
Just to be clear:
On a fresh Windows 10 install using GPT, the partition scheme is as follows with 4 partitions:

• 450MB Recovery (NTFS)
• 100 EFI System (FAT32)
• 16MB MSR (unformatted)
• C drive

On a fresh install using MBR, the partition scheme is:

• 500 MB System Reserved
• C Drive.

NOTE: There's no 450MB Recovery partition on fresh install using MBR. The 450MB recovery only existed with MBR disk type when you upgrade to Windows 10 from previous version of Windows.
@spacecon,
Apparently you did upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and that's why your System Reserved is only 100MB then Windows created an extra 450MB Recovery partition next to C Drive.
As seen in post #36, even though Windows still boot up and working, your partition scheme is still a mess and might cause problem in future update.

 

Cerebrus, I appreciate your comments. Let me first say that I definitely am taking heed of your advice. I admit that I do not understand all of it all the time, but I re-read everything multiple times and try to proceed with caution. That being said,
1. I did not move the partitions around for no reason. I had the recovery on the right end, after the C drive, and (as you pointed out) it is easier to resize the working C drive and makes backups and restores smaller and easier if the recovery is not on the right side of the C drive. So all I wanted to do was move the recovery to the other side of the C drive so that I could shrink or extend C drive as desired. I would think I am not the first to want to do that, but I don't know, maybe.
2. I DID make backups (Macrium reflect) and I have those available, so I should be OK. Otherwise I would not have attempted this. So I can restore the image to what it was, but that will once again have the recovery on the right side of C drive.
Again, thanks for the help. Am I totally off trying to make it easier to shrink/expand my C drive?

 

Thank you for the explanation which I partially understand. Yes, I did upgrade to W10 from W7. when I did, Windows put the recovery partition on the right side of the C drive. The reason I wanted to move it to the left side is so that when I make backups, it is easier to restore if there is nothing on the far right using the whole disk. If there is, then you either have to have a disk large enough to hold even the unallocated space, or you have to jump through a few more hoops. At least that is what I have found, which may not be totally correct.

 

You got it. My bad, my miss. Fixated on the 100 MB but missed that it would have clearly been labeled EFI in DM (even though label is truncated) if I had been correct in my interpretation. My apologies to spacecon on that.

 

Glad you made a backup. You are overcomplicating things.

So long as recovery drive is moved to the far right, you can shrink or expand the C drive as much as you like (right up to the edge of the recovery partition).

 

Ok, I agree that it doesn't look right to have this extra partition that I cannot figure out. When I use diskpart to try to delete partition 0 it tells me there is no volume. It also says it is a virtual disk and type 0F. I do not understand your instructions of doing a clean install and then restoring the C partition. The C partition is where Windows 10 is, so if I do a clean install and then restore C I will end up with windows twice? Here is what I intend to do:

1. recover the image I made for this computer before I moved things around.
2. Show you what I have in diskpart and Disk Manager.
3. Ask what I should do next (maybe nothing?)

Thanks again. As you can probably tell, I am not well versed in disk management. But I do make a lot of backups just in case!