Removing duplicate recovery partition

[octafish]

I've installed Windows 11 onto a new build PC, it seems that the C drive has two recovery partitions - diskpart info below:

Partition ### Type Size Offset
Partition 1 Recovery 450MB 1024KB
Partition 2 System 100MB 451MB
Partition 3 Reserved 16MB 551MB
Partition 4 Primary 1861GB 567MB
Partition 5 Recovery 642MB 1862GB

Is it possible to remove Partition 1 and just have a single recovery partition?

 

[im4gine3]

Not sure which is the main recovery partition but you can remove them (if you don't plan on using the 'reset this pc' option to wipe the machine)

You can use diskpart for this:

Open command prompt as admin

use the following commands

list disk
select disk 0 (if your main OS drive is on disk 0)
list partition (to verify you are selecting the right partition.. you don't want to accidently delete the wrong one)
select partition 5
delete partition override

I use this whenever i build a new machine as it can become a pain when i want to extend a disk, but i'm unable to do so because there are partitions at the end. Saves having to use soemthing like PartitionMagic or testdisk to move partitions around

 

[octafish]

Thanks, yes diskpart is the bees knees, in fact as I'd just installed W11 onto an existing NVMe drive I just did a re-install, and deleted all partitions of the drive during install.

 

[SpellowHouse]

You can delete the recovery partitions, they aren't required for normal operation.

I am not exactly sure how a disc can end up with two, but it can. Personally, I just leave them alone these days, on grounds that the amount of space they use is very small.

 

[octafish]

The story I heard was that originally the recovery partition was the first; when subsequently it was not big enough for later releases it was added at the end, where resizing would be easier. But the original partition remained as its harder to reclaim that space without moving everything else around. Not sure if this is a true story but it sounded plausible.

 

[tangey]

So a tangential question.

I have a lenovo tablet that was supplied with win10, and I updated to win11. I recently did a "reset this PC", and was surprised that it reset it with win11. It looks like the win11 update also updates the recovery partition, I didn't realise it would do that.