The short answer is yes, but no.
Yes, you can delete partitions, but no, I would not advise it. As you say, you don’t know what the partitions are, so you don’t know whether or not they’re needed. It’d be a shame to delete one and find out later that this was a serious mistake.
However, if you feel the need, I do have one approach to doing it more or less safely.
Why so many partitions?
Newer machines frequently come with Windows 10 installed and the primary hard disk partitioned into as many as five separate partitions.
This leaves many people asking: why? Why all those partitions when a single partition did the job in the past?
It’s the result of several changes over the years, including UEFI, the disappearance of installation media, and more.
What are those partitions?
Using one of my machines, an original Microsoft Surface tablet, as example, we see the following partitions:
- Recovery Partition (600MB)
- EFI System (200MB)
- C: (110GB)
- Recovery Partition (450MB)
- Recovery Partition (7.8GB)
The EFI partition is required by UEFI/GPT formatted hard drives. It’s what the machine boots into when first started. Confusingly, this is often referred to as the “System” partition, even though it’s not the system you and I might think of.
The C: partition is obvious: that’s the hard disk you see and use when you’re running Windows. This is what I tend to think of as the “system” partition or drive, since it contains my system (Windows), as well as all my applications and data. It’s by far the largest partition on the drive.
The three recovery partitions are more of a conundrum. I theorize that the larger one, at 7.81 gigabytes, contains a pristine copy of Windows 10 and takes the place of physical installation media. The other two I suspect are recovery consoles containing the recovery environment, tools, and other recovery options.
I also suspect that recovery partitions are extremely manufacturer-dependent. What I see on my machine will be different than what you see on yours. Even the content of these partitions varies dramatically based on the decisions made by your computer’s manufacturer.
My advice: leave well enough alone
If you want to remove partitions, it’s important to realize that you’re trading off the reasons for the layout — whatever those reasons were — for a small increase in disk space.
My example machine above is already fairly old, with a comparatively small hard disk. Even if I did delete all the partitions other than the required EFI partition and the C: partition, I’d be recovering only 8.5GB at best, an increase of less than 8%.
Given that today’s hard drives are larger while the sizes of the reserved partitions haven’t increased proportionately, you’re likely to get even less of an increase.
In my mind, it just isn’t worth it. I’d much prefer to have the recovery options available to me should I ever need them.
If you must: create a safety net
There is one way to do this safely, of course.
Start with a complete image backup of the entire hard drive. Make sure all partitions are included. Save that backup somewhere. (If you’re backing up regularly, as you should be, you may already have this. If you’re at all uncertain, make another backup.)
Then delete the partitions. If you’re going this far, I’d be tempted to delete all the “recovery” partitions with the knowledge that should your system need recovery, you’ll need to do it some other way. Typically, that means booting from a manufacturer-supplied recovery disc, system disc, or USB stick, or restoring the backed-up system from the previous step to perform a recovery.
Merging the freed-up space can be as simple as using Windows’ own built-in disk manager, or it may require a partition-management tool to combine the freed-up space.
Do this
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Podcast audio
- Can I Make My C: Partition Bigger by Taking Space from D:? – Changing the layout of the hard disk to make the C: partition bigger requires a few steps and occasionally special tools.
- Should I Partition My Hard Disk? – Partitioning, or splitting a single physical hard drive into multiple logical drives, has pros and cons. I’ll look at those and make a recommendation.
- How Do I Remove the Recovery Partition on My Machine? – If you’re doing backups properly, recovery partitions can become redundant. I’ll look at how to remove a recovery partition and reclaim the space.
I delete all of my recovery partitions and merge them into the C: drive. My reasoning is that if I can’t access the drive, the recovery partitions would be useless anyway. I rely on my backups which will restore the machine to a more useful state than the recovery partition would. I also have bare bones backups which I take when I start up my machines the first time.
I am surprised that people even know what a partition is. When I upgraded to Windows 10, my partition was erased. I now use it for extras storage. To recover the drive, I just use my Recovery DVD’s that I burned just after upgrading to 10. And yes, I even tested them. I wonder how much money HP saved by forcing me to make my own recovery DVD’s.
Do manufacturers assume that people back up their software?
Would it be possible to look at these recovery partitions to determine what they contain?
You can look at them if you have admin privileges. Whether you can understand what is in them is another story. They contain the information to restore a computer to its factory state Windows installation.
With several recent “Windows Feature Updates” I have been dismayed to find that Windows itself alters the size of the “C:” system partition by stealing a few MB off the back end, presumably for some sort of “recovery”. This has caused grief when I needed to restore my system image only to find the size on the original disk partition is then “too small” for the restored imagine (I use ShadowProtect; perhaps other image backup program do not have this issue). To circumvent this I always now leave a small unallocated space after the C: partition so I can adjust as necessary to accommodate Window’s malicious “We know better” behavior.
It would appear that Microsoft has now made all except the main C: (or system partition) now invisible when using the disk defragment tool in Windows 10 1803. In previous versions when using the disk defragment tool you could optimise a couple of partitions since usually more than one appeared within it.. However, now it is either the whole hard drive or just the C; partition that is presented for defragmentation or optimisation. This is welcome, not least for the ‘leave well alone’ reasons given but also it eliminates any confusing perception that the sheer presentation of such multiple partitions might cause.
I think this article kind of avoids the topic.
What if i want to delete the useless partitions because im about to clone my drive to a completely new computer? Where the manufacture partitions wouldn’t matter even if i wanted to use recovery?
I’d clone them, and then remove them on the new computer (and then use partition management tools — probably 3rd party — to move and extend the remaining partition to take up the entire disk.)
I replaced a HDD with a samsung ssd in an older Dell laptop and here’s my experience. I cloned the new drive with Macrium Reflect Free, installed the new drive and it would not load , got the screen that said repair your computer. I swapped the drive out and this time I used Samsung Data Migration, it cloned my hard drive minus the OEM partitions(for some reason it won’t copy the Oem partitions). I swapped the new one back in again and Windows loaded fine, but when I tried to do a fresh backup of the new system, Macrium would not see and of my external hard drives in the usb PE environment, no matter what I tried. I messed around a bit and remembered this article and I decided to leave the Samsung drive in and somehow restore a backup image of my old drive I took just before I began the swap to the new Sansung drive. I was finally able to see one of my drives in the Macrium(non usb) Windows environment and restored my old drive’s image to the new drive, and now everything works perfect. You can make of this what you will but it does strike me that everthing finally worked when the old partitions were copied. My original plan actually was to simply install an image onto the new drive after swapping drives, but I read so many articles saying how easy cloning was I went that route first try, which didn’t work out great for me. Anyway my new ssd drive works great now and has really sped up loading and other processes on an 8 year old(I was getting nervous) laptop with the original HDD drive. I’m glad I read your article, thanks.
why leave it alone? I prefer it to be said as “No requirement of modification.”
What if i don’t want the the recovery partition nor the system partition in windows 10, on a hard drive with an mbr??
What if I want to free up the partitions for other reasons, like installing linux, or another o.s. alongside of win10??
One time, I backed up my system and left out the Recovery and other non c: partitions from the backup. When my hard drive died, I restored my backup to the new drive. It didn’t work because Windows required those partitions to run. At first, I panicked. The I installed Windows from the installation DVD and then I was able to restore from my backup. Luckily restoring from the backup didn’t overwrite the other required partitions.
A couple of years ago I replaced my C: HDD by Samsung SSD. No problem at all. Then, some day after a Windows update the system died. Fortunately I had Macrium Reflect back up and recovered the system without an issue.
I always back up and experienced no issues but recently I realized that my C: drive has 4 partitions:
Part. 1 (None) Primary Fat32 (LBA)
Part. 2 Local Disk SSD (C:) Primary NTFS
Part. 3 (None) Primary NTFS
Part. 4 (None) Primary NTFS
While backing up with Macrium Reflect’s ‘Imaging Sumary’ reports:
“Backup Definition File: D:\Backups\Reflect\My Backup(1).xml
XML Validation: Disk ‘D792F979’, Partition ‘2’ not found.”
What puzzles me is that the reported Not Found Partition 2. is the Windows system disk.
Now, AOMEI Backupper shows only three partitions and backup without issues!
BUT, AOMEI Partition Assistance reports FOUR partitions as Macrium does.
Thanks Leo for the article, as you recommended I will not touch any of those partitions.