Windows 10: Windows 10 upgrade installing on recovery partition.

Windows 10 is downloading to my win 8 recovery partition and before it's complete it tells me the recovery partition is full, which it is. I've run disc clean up and still no luck. Any way to get win 10 to download to another partition?

:)

 

Why are there duplicate 450MB recovery partitions on Windows 10?

AFAIK, Windows 10 uses the different layout for recovery partition, thus it is unable to reuse recovery partition from previous Windows installation.

This does not happen if you do a clean install of Windows 10. This happens only if you upgrade your existing Windows installation (Win8.1, etc.). I have
verified this by comparing clean installation of Windows 10 with Win8.1 -> Win10 upgrade. Googling around also reveals many other people with the same issue - often resulting in over 5+ recovery partitions created (during various reverts/upgrades).

In other words, one of these partitions is created by Windows 10 for itself, another one is simply the old recovery partition from Win8.1 or whatever was installed before.

You can identify currently active recovery partition by issuing:

reagentc /info

command in elevated command promt.

P.S. "delete old Windows files" in Disk Cleanup does not delete old recovery partition (it only erases Windows.old on file system).

See also: The Recovery Partition After Upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 7/8.

 

if you upgrade to Win 10 from a OEM Win 8 Computer be aware

if you upgrade to Win 10 from a OEM Win 8 Computer be aware

if you have a OEM Windows 8 computer (Hewlett-Packard,Acer,Toshiba ect.) and installed Windows 8.1

it adds a extra 350mb recovery partition

now if you had to restore back to Windows 8 from the OEM recovery Partition the extra 350mb recovery

gets left on the hard drive

now from a fresh install back to Windows 8 from the OEM recovery partition you upgrade to Windows 8.1 it adds another 350mb recovery partition so now there is 2 350mb recovery partition and if you keep going back to Windows 8 from the OEM recovery partition
and upgrade to Windows 8.1 it adds another

Windows defrag see's these 350mb recovery partition as Local Disk (\\?\VOLUME and can not defrag them

i asked this question on July 8

upgrade to Win 10 but Too Many Recovery Partitions from Win 8.1

Jayant Gupta a Microsoft Support Engineer in this post say's

" i would like to provide you with the information that, if you have another HD then I would suggest you to re-install the OS and get ready to upgrade to Windows 10. Having too many reserved partitions might cause Windows 10 upgrade to fail "

upgrade to Win 10 but Too Many Recovery Partitions from Win 8.1

please be aware if you plan to upgrade to Windows 10



James

 

What method are you using to download Windows 10? Set your browser to ask where to download files each time - that varies by the browser - and download the ISO file from Tech Bench. That way you can choose where to download the ISO file to:

Download Windows 10 ISO from TechBench - Windows 10 Forums

 

You shouldn't be storing anything on the recovery partition. +1 for the Tech Bench ISO.

 

What method are you using to upgrade?

Windows Update ... Get Windows 10 (GWX icon) ... or the web: Windows - Microsoft ?

I'd also like to see your Disk Management - Windows might choose the partition with the most free space - it shouldn't use the Recovery part, but ....

Step 1: Download this zip file (contains dmDskmgr-vd.mmc)

dmDskmgr-vd.zip
Step 2: Double click dmDskmgr-vd.zip to open the compressed folder
Double click dmDskmgr-vd.mmc to launch the custom Disk Management console
You'll get an output similar to this:




Press Alt+PrtScn to grab a snapshot of just the Disk Management window
Open Paint and Ctrl+V to paste it, then save the image
Attach the image to a new post.

 

The install was from Microsoft over the internet. I ended up manually clearing out enough of the files in recovery to allow the download. Windows 10 is up and running. I do plan to study the process you suggested for future reference. Thank you for your attention and intelligent response.