Solved After clean install, two Recovery Partitions

I recently built a new computer, which is to emphasize that it had no software on it of any kind, let alone an operating system. I built bootable W11 install media on my old W7 computer & used that to do a clean install of W11 Pro 23H2 on the new, bare computer. I've been running W11 for a couple of weeks & only just now noticed I have not one but TWO recovery partitions on my boot drive. I looked for a tutorial that explains (a) what a recovery partition is & (b) how to use it. I'd also like to know what created the first one & why do I have a second one. Then there's the question of how do I delete the extra one (I assume I can delete it) & expand my boot partition to use that space. I can't believe such a tutorial doesn't exist but I can't find it. My search for "recovery partition" gave me a number of hits, including this thread, but not the simple tutorial on the subject I'm looking for. I should expect Brink wrote it. He's written practically all the tutorials. So if somebody could just give me the link, I'd be most grateful.

@WildWilly Very easy. You didn't run a Clean Installation! Probably you run an Inplacement. Depending on the previous system, you either have an old Recovery on Partition (1) or behind the current one on (Partition5). In the first case, you have an useless partition. In the second case you can increase the size of the primary Recovery Partition. It can be done by basic diskpart-commands.

WildWilly said:

I recently built a new computer, which is to emphasize that it had no software on it of any kind, let alone an operating system. I built bootable W11 install media on my old W7 computer & used that to do a clean install of W11 Pro 23H2 on the new, bare computer. I've been running W11 for a couple of weeks & only just now noticed I have not one but TWO recovery partitions on my boot drive. I looked for a tutorial that explains (a) what a recovery partition is & (b) how to use it. I'd also like to know what created the first one & why do I have a second one. Then there's the question of how do I delete the extra one (I assume I can delete it) & expand my boot partition to use that space. I can't believe such a tutorial doesn't exist but I can't find it. My search for "recovery partition" gave me a number of hits, including this thread, but not the simple tutorial on the subject I'm looking for. I should expect Brink wrote it. He's written practically all the tutorials. So if somebody could just give me the link, I'd be most grateful.

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Hi… When I recently performed a clean instillation of 11 on a new PC(I built myself) I ended up with two recovery partitions. It's a normal thing to have two. I wouldn't delete the second one. I hope that helps.

@POLYSIUS No, I did not do an upgrade in place. Read my post again. There was nothing on the system when I started. Nothing. I built the system, like @BunnyJ did. There was nothing to upgrade from. The SSD came out of a cardboard box. There was nothing on it. It was a clean install.

@BunnyJ Thank you for you reply. OK. So what I have is normal. Weird but normal. So where do I find instructions on how to use that space? What's in it? Under what circumstances is it useful? I'm not looking for an answer here. I expect the answer is on this forum somewhere. I'm just not finding it. Where is that tutorial? It has to exist. It should be called, "How to Use a Recovery Partition." I haven't found it.

No. Wait. I just looked at your image more closely @BunnyJ. You have only 1 recovery partition. The other one is the system partition. You have your system partition, your boot partition, then ONE recovery partition. Here's what I have:



Not the same. Your drive has 3 partitions. Mine has 4, 2 of which are labelled Recovery Partition. Something weird is going on here.

WildWilly said:

Mine has 4, 2 of which are labelled Recovery Partition

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I suspect that one of out regular partition experts would be able to answer your question assuming that they saw it buried away here.
I've definitely seen instructions for removing a Recovery partition and I think that included explanations of what it does.

I suggest you create a new thread of your own called something like Clean install on unused disk created two Recovery partitions - how do I remove one? That should attract their attention.
And do post a link to your new thread here so people can leap across.


Best of luck,
Denis

WildWilly said:

No. Wait. I just looked at your image more closely @BunnyJ. You have only 1 recovery partition. The other one is the system partition. You have your system partition, your boot partition, then ONE recovery partition. Here's what I have:

View attachment 81321

Not the same. Your drive has 3 partitions. Mine has 4, 2 of which are labelled Recovery Partition. Something weird is going on here.

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I wouldn't worry about it.

I recently built a computer, which is to say, the install on it was totally clean, from scratch, not an upgrade from another system, just an upgrade from nothing to W11 Pro 23H2. My current boot drive looks like this:



My questions are these:

What is a Recovery Partition for? Recovery from what? Recovery to what? How do I use it?

Why do I have 2? Can I delete one of them? If yes, which one? Can I then expand my boot partition to use the space that's freed up?

I'm surprised I haven't found the tutorial that describes Recovery Partitions & how to use them.

Maybe that there is still a folder "Windows.old" or you have to analyse C:\$WINDOWS.~BT to find out what happend. But what you tell us is not the complete truth!
If you type cmd (admin)
reagentc /info
you get the answer. I guess it is
\\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition4\Recovery\WindowsRE

That means that the other useless is on partition5
Recovery Partitions are protected and you have to assign a different ID before you delete or work with them.
You could try:
Cmd (admin)
diskpart
sel disk 0
sel par 5
delete partition override
exit

and it's gone

Not sure why 2 Recovery partitions were created during install. Not sure I've ever seen that happen. And 2 different sizes even. Perhaps a glitch during the installation itself? Many people actually delete the Recovery partition as it's not needed with good Image backups. A quick search turned up this topic: Deleted Windows Recovery Partition - How to Make a New One

Basically you can delete both of them and then recreate a new one. Google search is your friend as there are tons of suggestions. I am still curious how this happened to begin with.

Probably already determined, but are you positive the "new drive" is not someone else's return?

WildWilly said:

I recently built a computer, which is to say, the install on it was totally clean, from scratch, not an upgrade from another system, just an upgrade from nothing to W11 Pro 23H2. My current boot drive looks like this:

View attachment 81323

My questions are these:

What is a Recovery Partition for? Recovery from what? Recovery to what? How do I use it?

Why do I have 2? Can I delete one of them? If yes, which one? Can I then expand my boot partition to use the space that's freed up?

I'm surprised I haven't found the tutorial that describes Recovery Partitions & how to use them.

Click to expand...

Visit the link below for an explanation regarding recovery partitions and further details.

Just for info. Download the free version of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

In my setup I have two recovery partitions but that is because I dual boot. To find out which recovery partition you can remove is to right click the partition and select 'Explore'. It will give the date and time of the recovery partition. Select the oldest to remove. As they take so little space on the drive I don't think it's worth bothering with.
Any time you need to work on partitions it is a must to first create an image of the drive as sometimes disasters can happen.

WildWilly said:

My questions are these:

What is a Recovery Partition for? Recovery from what? Recovery to what? How do I use it?

Why do I have 2? Can I delete one of them? If yes, which one? Can I then expand my boot partition to use the space that's freed up?

I'm surprised I haven't found the tutorial that describes Recovery Partitions & how to use them.

Click to expand...

The Recovery Partition holds the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE.wim) which you can invoke by booting to Advanced Startup. There is a tutorial, but you probably didn't use the right search terms to find it....


I don't know why you ended up with two. That can happen sometimes if you get a Feature Update, say you installed 21H2 and that got updated to 22H2 (or 23H2). You can find out from a command prompt (Admin) which one is active using Reagentc /info. It is safe to delete the one that's not in use. If you disable the Recovery environment first, it is safe to delete both. You must disable the recovery environment first, if you delete an active recovery partition you will loose your only copy of WinRE.wim and no longer be able to use Advanced Startup.


If you re-enable the recovery environment after deleting the recovery partition(s) and expanding the C: drive to use all the free space, then a new recovery partition will not be made. Rather, Windows will put WinRE.wim in C:\Recovery\WinRE and boot from it there if you boot to Advanced Startup.

It's perfectly normal. I started out with a clean install off 21h2 and one recovery partition. I then upgraded to 22h2 and a second partition was created.
Each time you upgrade Windows to the next version, the upgrade program checks the space on the system reserved or recovery partition. If the previous recovery partition has enough unallocated space after it, that partition will extend into the unallocated space. However,If the previous recovery partition does not have enough space for the upgrade and there is no(or not enough) unallocated space afterwards, the upgrade will shrink the Windows partition and create an additional recovery partition.
So you will encounter situations where you have multiple recovery partitions. It's quite possible if you used the 22h2 iso to install and then WU installed the 23h2 enablement package that it needed more recovery space.
I don't worry about mine. I just let Windows do it's thing.

Note: the reason I have that small amount of unallocated space is that this installation was originally on a 256 gb ssd. I have since restored an image of that install to a 1tb ssd. There was a little user screw-up when I did this that left that tiny bit of unallocated space. .


other thread here. Is it normal to have two recovery partitions?

I am so encouraged by all the responses I've gotten here. Thank you all. This forum has been a treasure trove of indispensable help, just as sevenforums was in the past.

@POLYSIUS Stop telling me I am not telling the complete truth. You keep trying to imply that I have screwed something up. I have not. This system works perfectly. I do not have a Windows.old directory. I had several of them at an earlier stage of trying to install because I kept hitting the problem of the install not connecting me to the Internet. So I kept retrying. Unbeknownst to me, each retry thought I was trying to install on top of an existing installation. Except I had never managed to get to the desktop. Thanks to advice I eventually found in this forum, I did Shift+F10 & ran something in oobe that let me complete the install without logging into my Microsoft account. I deleted all of those Windows.old directories right after I finally got booted to a desktop & started looking at what I had. I also do not have a C:\$Windows.~BT. The only $ directories I have are $Recycle.Bin & $SysReset. I believe the $SysReset comes from the system resets I did before I got taught here that I was not doing a repair. I meant to do a repair but I was doing a reset instead. Once I learned how to do repair, I needed to do it only once. I have done one Repair Install. I am guessing from the comments here that the second recovery partition got created by that. But contrary to what you keep trying to convince me of, I did a clean install onto a bare computer. This was not an upgrade. There was no previous operating system installed on this machine. This was a clean install on a machine I built from parts myself. This was not a pre-configured package purchase. It is a completely hand-made setup & I did it myself. All the hardware was new & unused before I put it together.

Of course there is a tutorial by Brink. There is always one of those. The keywords I had no idea I needed to search for were things like "advanced startup," "WinRE," that I had no idea would be relevant. That tutorial offers the Easter egg of Shift+Restart. Now, how is anybody supposed to know that off the top of their head? Honestly, that's unfair. But now I know.

reagentc tells me this:



diskpart tells me this:




Between the 2 of those, it appears that the Recovery Partition of size 674M is the useless one created by my Repair Install. Some curiosities that I note. First, the partition numbering doesn't start from 0. Disks are numbered starting at 0, but not partitions. Surprising, inconsistent, but whatever. Diskpart lists a tiny reserved partition of 16M that does not show up in Disk Management. However, Disk Management lists partitions numbered 1, 4, & 5 to cover the system partition & the 2 recovery partitions. The partition numbered 3 isn't listed as partition 3. It's my C-drive & that's how Disk Management lists it. The partition numbered 2 is a ghost. Disk Management seems to recognize it but that is in evidence only by the partition numbering. The partition itself is not listed, neither in the disk list nor the graphical view. Hmmmm.........

A stealth refurb SSD . . . Now that's a twisted idea that had not occurred to me in my all too innocent naivete. The box that held the SSD was duly sealed with two of those tamper resistant stickers. It sure looked like mine were the first hands to touch this item since it left the factory. It's too late now to do a dir on it before first use. That would have definitively eliminated this James Bond-like possibility. I didn't have anything that could have done such an operation. The new computer was utterly bare. The SSD is where W11 was going to go (and now is). I suppose I could have broken out of the install with Shift+F10, but I didn't learn that trick until after I had done a certain amount of the installation & some things had already been written on the SSD. My old W7 machine wouldn't recognize an NVMe SSD. It had an M.2 slot. I did try to install an SSD in that slot several months ago. The BIOS didn't recognize it. It was an 8-year-old system. Whatever NVMe SSDs existed 8 years ago are apparently no longer available on the market, at least, not without more digging than I've been willing to do. That failure, my failure to install more RAM, & Mozilla's decision to drop support for W7 combined to incite me to get new hardware & install a modern operating system on it. So I had no way to ensure that my new SSD was in fact brand new straight from the factory & not refurbished. I must have faith that it was not a refurb but I admit that does require some faith. I have no evidence that there was anything on this SSD before I started using it. But I admit I can't prove that with hard facts. On balance, I think that's only a very remote possibility.

My path to W11 installation was to use my only operating computer at the time: W7. I got an ISO from Microsoft & built bootable USB media following instructions I found in this forum. I repeat. I used W7 to create my W11 install media. I did everything right. The proof is I am here using W11 to post this. I also want to be clear that I did not upgrade from W7. W7 was on another computer. This computer, where I am now running W11, started out bare, nothing previously installed on it. The ISO I got from Microsoft was for 23H2. So I have never even used an older version of W11. My timing appears to have been such that I got the 23H2 ISO within days of its release, a lucky accident. So the extraneous recovery partition did not come as a result of going from 22H2 to 23H2 or some other maintenance path. I started on 23H2. But the W7 & W11 installations were/are on separate computers that bear no connection with each other. The geography of my living environment is such that I could not physically have both computers powered on & booted up at the same time. So this W11 is not an upgrade or anything like that. It is a clean install.

I have a fully licensed version of Macrium Reflect. I think I'm going to deal with this by imaging my boot drive & restoring it in such a way as to blast the recovery partition numbered 5 out of existence. I have already backed up my data partitions but I have not yet created Reflect rescue media. That is an exercise I did complete on my old W7 but I have not yet done that on W11. It was already on my to-do list. Now I have some advice that will make an impact on what I will use it for. I think I will preserve the one recovery partition. It's small & unobtrusive, being at the back end of this 2T SSD. And I am going with the attitude that if it was created, there might some day be some reason I might want it. I can't imagine what the conditions would be in which I would want it. But I'm not enough of an expert to decisively say I will never need it. Better to have & not need than need & not have.

It is interesting. I would see if there is winre.wim on the last partition, copy it out with diskgenius and check what version it is.

Diskgenius is useful because it doesnt only show what is in a hidden partition. There are also options on the context menu to copy, delete, etc.

I havent got a recovery partition to demonstrate, but here is the same process on an esp partition.

Select the partition, click the Files tab, then rt click any file/folder to get the options

WildWilly said:

reagentc tells me this:

View attachment 81372

diskpart tells me this:

View attachment 81373


Between the 2 of those, it appears that the Recovery Partition of size 674M is the useless one created by my Repair Install.

Click to expand...

That's exactly what happend. You made a Repair Install. I call it Inplacement, because it's the same process.
It upgraded the WinRE.wim and created the new 786 MB Partition. (Par 4)
So just delete Par 5 and with 2 more diskpart commands you can extend Par 4 by the unallocated space of 674 MB to the new one.
That's it.

The complete command steps:
cmd (admin)
reagentc /disable
diskpart
sel disk 0
sel par 5
delete partition override
sel par 4
set id="ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7"
EXTEND
set id="de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac"
exit
reagentc /enable

The set id-commands are needed because the Recovery Partition is protected.
check the new Recovery by
reagentc /info

use copy & paste

Disk Genius. That looks like an interesting tool. Thanks for mentioning it.

I don't know about versions but here's what I'm seeing:




Interesting that in contradiction to diskpart, Disk Genius numbers the partitions from 0. So partition 3 in Disk Genius is partition 4 in diskpart, & partition 4 in Disk Genius is partition 5 in diskpart. Are we confused enough yet?

In any case, the rightmost partition on the drive (there, that begs the issue of the partition numbers) has a Winre.wim dated May 5 this year & it's 571.6M. The next partition to the left has a winre.wim (note the different letter casing, which I know is insignificant, but still, it's different) dated December 4, the day after I got this running, & it's 691.2M, a shade bigger. Clearly the latter one is newer & obviously from my Repair Install.

I've copied each one out to one of my regular directories on a regular HDD. Now how would I check version number exactly? The file properties don't give me that information. And Disk Genius doesn't even have an option for popping up file properties. I tried opening one of them in Notepad++ in the hopes there might be something in plain text that could be human-readable. But the file is mostly hex stuff, only machine readable. Not surprising, I suppose.

You have all the infos you need to do the job.