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I upgraded my gaming PC to W10 and now I have a 450MB recovery partition. The system reserved partition is a carry over from W8.1. Disk Management is saying the C drive is the boot partition so do I actually need the other two partitions?
The System Reserved partition should not be messed with, it contains the boot manager and boot configuration data. It's also integral to the Bitlocker encryption feature.
The Recovery Partition is pretty much self explanatory, it contain the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). If you delete this partition you obviously won't be able to use windows recovery options. You cannot delete this partition under Disk Management but you can using diskpart.exe. Even then, you may have a problem when trying to absorb the unallocated space. If you want to delete this partition, best to use a third party tool such as Aomei Partition Assistant.
Unless you are desperate for additional space on the hard drive, I would suggest leaving both partitions alone.
Moderators
Thanks Jim that explains it very well. Really do not the disk space, just curious as to what happened during the W10 upgrade. Is the Recovery Partition tied in with the $WINDOWS.~BT folder that is also created during the W10 upgrade.
No, not really. This folder is more tied to the rollback feature. If you have no intention of rolling back to the previous OS, you can safely delete this folder along with the Windows-old folder. I believe they are deleted automatically after one month anyway.
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All that is on these partition is the basic data to boot and run each OS, all other data is on the data drive. A fully updated W7 is almost twice as large as W10. Makes me wonder if MS will have another SP for W7 before support ends.
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