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I just did a clean install of Windows 10 on my laptop, and Windows places a 450MB recovery partition at the beginning of my boot drive.

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Is there a way to delete the recovery partition, and reallocate the space to the "C:" partition? AOMEI, EaseUS, etc., claim to have this capability, but in fact do not; none of the utilities that I can find will move the partition with the active operating system. This makes sense. Is there a command-line utility or a boot loader that will move the partitions before the OS is loaded?

the_meter413
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  • The first two partitions normally contain import operating system files. It always causes issues by deleting them. If you had a 10GB drive, I could understand why you would want to delete them. But with another nearly 700GB free, its not worth the effort and risk. If you was to delete it, all the contents of your drive would have to be moved forward by 450MB to add it to the end of the C: partition. – mt025 Feb 04 '18 at 04:33
  • You should never delete the [WinRE](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-recovery-environment--windows-re--technical-reference) [**Win**dows **R**ecovery **E**nvironment] partition, as doing so will result in an inability to repair Windows without an Install USB, coupled with breaking several features in the OS. WinRE should be the first partition, versus the last partition, as SSDs are common and should be over-provisioned [OP], usually requiring the last partition to contain the 10% of disk space to be unallocated for OP. – JW0914 Jun 14 '21 at 13:01

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You can avoid this problem by doing the partitioning yourself before the Windows install which you can do from diskpart from the console (Shift + F10 in the Installer or recovery environment or you can do it with a Linux live cd using parted of fdisk.

However its probably good idea to keep the ESP somewhere around 256MiB to future proof it for multi-boot systems. Further I would create the recovery partition after the Windows partition anyway so you have it. It's then trivial to delete it later and resize the Windows partition.

If you want to keep the current system intact you can either use gparted to move all the data over or you can use diskclone to copy all of the allocated data only to another disk or partition.

jdwolf
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  • Does diskpart from the console offer different options than the GUI disk partitioner that appears during a "custom" install? I completely removed all existing drive partitions when using the GUI installer, but there were no options whatsoever for a recovery partition let alone where it should place it on the HDD. – the_meter413 Feb 04 '18 at 05:48
  • There was an option to create your own partition(s) and that's the point of this answer. All Windows needs (in modern hardware) is the ESP (EFI partition) and a big enough NTFS partition. If you let the installer do this it will always create a recovery partition as well. –  Feb 04 '18 at 22:44
  • The [WinRE](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/windows-recovery-environment--windows-re--technical-reference) [**Win**dows **R**ecovery **E**nvironment] partition should never be deleted, as doing so breaks OS features & results in an inability to repair w/o an Install USB. WinRE should be the first partition, versus the last partition, as SSDs are common and should be over-provisioned [OP], usually requiring the last partition to contain the 10% of disk space to be unallocated for OP. `DiskPart` is what's used to partition in Windows, not Linux tools. – JW0914 Jun 13 '21 at 12:28
  • @the_meter413 The installer's GUI, along with `diskmgmt.msc`, use `DiskPart` on the backend and WinRE's partition should always be created - you can see the steps the installer takes in `DiskPart` in Steps 1 - 4 within the last part of [this](https://superuser.com/a/1581804/529800) answer _("How do I configure system partitions on a new drive for applying an image?")_ – JW0914 Jun 14 '21 at 13:08