Can I delete Partition 3 and 5?

wimorrison · Aug 1, 2022

I had Aomei OneKey Recovery installed on this laptop, and it served well for several years however I needed to get rid of it for several reasons, primarily when a backup was done getting back into Windows could sometimes be a pain in the backside.

I therefore uninstalled it however I am now left with a mess of partitions and I would like to clean up, because I don't like a mess.

Partition 1 is Macrium RE, Partition 2 is the EFI, and then there is the Windows C:\ disk - but what are Partition3 and 5? Disc Manager doesn't even see Partition 3 and I wonder if Partition 5 is left over from Aomei?

Can I delete Partition 5, given that Macrium is using Partition1? Also can I get rid of Partition 3?

Thanks

FreeBooter · Aug 1, 2022

Can you assign a drive letter to those two partitions?

cereberus · Aug 1, 2022

Well, you could delete partition 3, but it is nonstandard if you remove it

I expect partition 5 is the valid recovery partition and partition 1 is now redundant.

Run

reagentc /info

from an admin commend prompt and post results.

wimorrison · Aug 1, 2022

I can assign a drive letter to Partition 5 and when I do, I can't see anything on it at all, but something is using the space because it says that there is only 67Mb free

I have 'show hidden files' enabled

I formatted Partition 3, as it wasn't formatted, assigned a letter, and it seems totally empty.

I might do a Macrium backup and delete them to see if all works OK - seem like a good idea

wimorrison · Aug 1, 2022

cereberus said:
Well, you could delete partition 3, but it is nonstandard if you remove it

I expect partition 5 is the valid recovery partition and partition 1 is now redundant.

Run

reagentc /info

from an admin commend prompt and post results.

What do you mean by deleting Partition 3 is 'non-standard' please?

The results of the command are;

Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

Windows RE status: Enabled
Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition5\Recovery\WindowsRE
Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 094f2fdc-d2fa-11ec-8d8f-bede882a5f22
Recovery image location:
Recovery image index: 0
Custom image location:
Custom image index: 0

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

Which would suggest that Partition 5 is the WinRE environment, therefore should I just leave everything as is?

FreeBooter · Aug 1, 2022

Enable show hidden folders.

wimorrison · Aug 1, 2022

FreeBooter said:
Enable show hidden folders.

Already showing

FreeBooter · Aug 1, 2022

Open the Command Prompt with administrative privileges and execute dir /a /s X: command to view hidden files replace X: drive letter with partition 5 drive letter.

Bree · Aug 1, 2022

wimorrison said:
I formatted Partition 3, as it wasn't formatted, assigned a letter, and it seems totally empty.

Well, it would be if you formatted it.

The original unformatted 128MB partition 3 was the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR). This is a standard feature of all GPT formatted drives. It is there to provide functions that were formerly performed by hidden sectors on an MBR drive. It is not used by the OS at all.

The UEFI specification does not allow hidden sectors on GPT-formatted disks. Microsoft reserves a chunk of disk space using this MSR partition type, to provide an alternative data storage space for such software components which previously may have used hidden sectors on MBR formatted disks

Microsoft Reserved Partition - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

From the size it looks to have been created by an install of Windows 8/8.1, probably the original OEM install the PC came with, which was later upgraded to Windows 10. A clean install of Windows 10 would have created a 16MB unformatted MSR. Here's mine, partition 2....

Bree · Aug 1, 2022

wimorrison said:
What do you mean by deleting Partition 3 is 'non-standard' please?

It is standard for all GPT drives to have an unformatted MSR partition. In Windows 8 this was 128MB, but as it gets little use Microsoft reduced that to just 16MB for Windows 10. As it is not used by the Windows OS at all, then deleting it appears to have no noticable effect. But it is still part of a standard clean install of Windows 10 on a UEFI/GPT system, so strictly speaking deleting it would make your system 'non-standard'.

JAM83 · Aug 1, 2022

wimorrison said:
I had Aomei OneKey Recovery installed on this laptop, and it served well for several years however I needed to get rid of it for several reasons, primarily when a backup was done getting back into Windows could sometimes be a pain in the backside.

I therefore uninstalled it however I am now left with a mess of partitions and I would like to clean up, because I don't like a mess.

Partition 1 is Macrium RE, Partition 2 is the EFI, and then there is the Windows C:\ disk - but what are Partition3 and 5? Disc Manager doesn't even see Partition 3 and I wonder if Partition 5 is left over from Aomei?

Can I delete Partition 5, given that Macrium is using Partition1? Also can I get rid of Partition 3?

Thanks

View attachment 35424

Yes, you can delete them. They are just "recovery partitions". It will give you a little over 1GB of storage. . Not much, but yeah, they can safely be removed.

Can I delete Partition 3 and 5?

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