How can I reclaim 5GB of a recovery partition?

[cygnus11]

Reclaim 5GB Recovery Parition

After doing the Windows 10 upgrade on my Surface 3, it seems that the recovery partition may no longer be useful. Disk Management reports a 5.27 GB partition named "Recovery Partition" and it appears to be 100% free space.

So I was wondering if I could somehow reclaim this space. I would love to extend my Windows partition and gain that 5.27 GB. But I'm not sure if this is possible without doing a full Windows 10 reset.

I'm pretty sure Disk Management lets you Extend a partition into free space. And I also know that it allows you to delete partitions. But the problem is that this 5.27 GB Recovery Partition does not appear to be right next to my Windows partition. There is another small 450 MB Recovery Partition in between, which also appears to be empty.

Does anyone know if these "Recovery Partitions" are important anymore after the Windows 10 upgrade? Is it safe to delete them both and extend my Windows partition? I would love to understand what all these partitions are for and which ones are required and which ones can be safely removed.

I know doing a full reset will help me clean things up, but I would rather not do that if I can avoid it.

 

[Tersanyus]

Re: Reclaim 5GB Recovery Parition

I had this very same "issue". Is your 5GB recovery partition really empty? Mine was really empty after creating the USB recovery drive from the steps done at the Microsoft support article saying how to move your recovery drive to a USB drive. Next to last step in that article gives you an option to delete the recovery partition which I did.

Once that recovery partition was gone yeah there was a new 5GB drive there. Windows Disk Management utility showed same as you. The main Windows partition, some 450MB partition then the 5GB recovery partition now empty as a new drive. Yuck. I found Windows Disk Management Utility wouldn't be of any help here. Found EaseUs Partition Manager Free (important to get the free one). I can't post links so Google for it. Should download a file called "epm.exe". There's a trial version that doesn't seem to get the job done.

That EaseUS Partition Manager Free was able to "move" that 450MB partition between main Windows drive and the empty recovery drive to the end of the disk. Can't really explain how to move that 450MB partition to the end but play around with the EaseUS program and you can figure it out. Well for me that worked fine, 450MB partition is at the end of the disk. The Surface 3 worked fine after a reboot.

Now, this EaseUS program, probably because it is a free program would not do anything to combine the 5GB to the main Windows drive to get one bigger Windows drive. However, now Windows Disk Management Utility would work. I think I ended up deleting the 5GB partition so it was unpartitioned space. Some setting in Windows Disk Management Utility would extend the main Windows partition so it added the 5GB of unpartitioned space to the main C drive, thus having a larger C drive at the end.

Just be careful doing this. I did all this a few days ago and if you mess things up in that EaseUS program you can seriously kill your Surface 3. I'd make 100% sure you have a USB drive with your recovery partition on it.

 

[cygnus11]

Re: Reclaim 5GB Recovery Parition

Thanks for the information about the free partition manager. I will definitely look into that tool.

I'm now starting to wonder if my 5 GB partition really is empty. Disk Management reports it as empty, but I wonder if it is just configured to appear empty.

Since I don't really need the space, I think I may just leave it alone until I can verify that it truly is empty or verify that I won't ever need it for recovery.

 

[Tersanyus]

Re: Reclaim 5GB Recovery Parition

That free EaseUS program should be able to see if that 5GB drive really is empty or not. I think Windows Disk Manager just shows all those various recovery drives as empty when really they are not. Why? Beats me, I dunno!

Just so you know I have the AT&T LTE model so it was only 64GB to begin with. I was a little afraid of the low space but even more worried about the 2GB of RAM. I think it's blasphemy to have a PC with anything under 4GB or RAM in this day and age. But to my surprise in this last 2 weeks with the Surface 3 from AT&T it's fine. Not a heavy PC user anyway.

I had used disk cleanup to remove the windows.old directly and the upgrade files. Those were taking up some 16GB of space! After all was said and done I ended up with a C drive of about 32GB free after installing all my main apps like Office 365 and such. That's good for me. Still keep some stuff on a 64GB microSD card though.