How to expand the WINDOWS partition when the Recovery one is in the way?

Question

My partitions on my primary disk look like this:

I would like to expand C: with the Unallocated space but the 946 MB Recovery partition is in the way.

1. Is there a way to swap the Recovery partition with the Unallocated space (= move it to the end of the disk), to have contiguous WINDOWS and Unallocated space?
2. what would be the consequences of removing that 946 MB Recovery partition? There are numerous articles mentioning that it exists and how to remove it (with diskpart), but not what it actually stores and whether it is primordial to have it (as opposed to having a Windows 10 media disk one can boot from and go into repair mode)

Solution

You can't "swap" them but you can move the recovery partition easily. Any 3rd party partitioning software can do that, like MiniTool Partition Wizard, AOMEI Partition Assistant, EaseUS Partition Master, Macrorit Partition Expert...

So after installing any of them you need to

• Right click on the recovery partition > resize/move and move it all the way to the right
• Right click on the Windows partition > resize/move and resize it to fill the newly unallocated space on the right of it

Or you can remove the recovery partition completely. There would be no problem since Windows 10 already has built-in refresh and reset feature to do factory reset. You can also create an image of the recovery partition and store it somewhere before removing the partition

However it is possible to create a partition that spans across various spaces with dynamic disk, which is the analog of Linux's LVM. Just convert the disk to dynamic and extend the partition to any available space

Comments

[JW0914]

See this answer - the Recovery partition houses WinRE [Windows Recovery]. You need a WinRE partition, which only needs to be 650MB, for a variety of reasons, with a WinRE USB simply being inefficient and massively inconvenient; to understand why, see Microsoft Docs.

[Luke Fowler]

Please refer to https://superuser.com/questions/1453790/how-to-move-the-reco‌​very-partition-on-wi‌​ndows-10/1596291#159‌​6291 This answer provides excellent directions Thanks,

[WoJ]

Thanks. I did not mention that I was (rather) looking for native solutions (not that 3rd party are not OK - I use parted on Linux - but was hoping that a built-in solution would be integrated). I will do that then if there are not other ideas.

[phuclv]

there's no native solution unless you're willing to use dynamic disks. Windows diskmgmt.msc is very limited in partitioning capability

[Tonny]

@woj you can use GParted on a Windows system too. Just download the gparted live image and boot it from a USB stick. Move the recovery partition to the back. Reboot into Windows and extend C:. Please note: before doing ANY repartitioning on a Windows system you should disable the fast-restart feature as that may interfere with 3rd party partitioning tools.

[Ramhound]

Recovery partition can also be deleted and recreated, it’s only required, if you want to be able to access WinRE without a disk.

[jbg]

If you wish to delete the recovery partition, you can do this without any third-party software. Open command prompt and then run diskpart, and then (for example): list disk; select disk 0; list partition; (carefully verify which partition is the recovery partition) select partition 4; delete partition override (override is needed as the recovery partition is protected).

[phuclv]

@jbg you don't even need diskpart because diskmgnt.msc already has that capability, and it's better because it has a GUI to visualize the layout of the disk. But not all recovery partitions are the same, some are put before the system partition or have their boot entry in Windows BCD, so if you delete it you risk the ability to boot the PC up again in many cases

[jbg]

diskmgnt.msc was unable to delete my recovery partition, so I had to use diskpart. YMMV.