Multiple recovery partitions in Windows 10

hard-drive partitioning windows windows-10

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When Windows upgrades to next version it creates a new recovery partition if the previous recovery partition is not big enough for recovery partition size of the upgrade version.

You can find the recovery partition current being used by running this command in elevated PowerShell.

reagentc /info

The unused partition can be safely deleted.

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Bangash

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Bangash over 1 year

I have an hp pavilion 17 power laptop with windows 10 home pre-installed. Today when I was creating an extra partition for Ubuntu and when I looked at the disk management window I was surprised because it had 4 recovery partitions instead of only one which is showed in the file explorer.

Are all of these extra recovery partitions with no drive letter important? Can I safely delete these extra partitions?
- Ramhound about 7 years
  
  Are all of these extra recovery partitions with no drive letter important? - Yes; Can I safely delete these extra partitions? - No; Worth pointing out you only have one 24.52 GB Recovery partition. The second "entry" for Recovery (D:) appears to be a glitch of some type. If you touched your partitions with Ubuntu and likely is the reason.
- Bangash about 7 years
  
  So the one answer and this comment both say that I should not play with the partitions and leave them alone, right?
- Admin about 7 years
  
  @Bangash correct! :-)
gronostaj over 6 years

Do you have any sources to back up your claim (the "if the previous recovery partition is not big enough" part)? I wonder if I can future-proof my disk layout if I don't want Windows to mess with it.
Jim Balter about 6 years

Sad that the only remotely correct answer here was downvoted. As for a source for the claim, see disk-partition.com/windows-10/…
Jim Balter about 6 years

The recovery partitions have nothing do to with booting.
Jack_Hu almost 3 years

This is the correct solution. I had 4 recovery partitions on a laptop I recently purchased off eBay. I just needed to know which was actually in use, and which were left over from OEM installation, Win8 -> Win10 upgrades, etc. This solved the problem perfectly. Thanks. :)