Anyone know how to shrink or remove the recovery partition?

Hey guys,

I just realized that 9 gigs of my SSD is being eaten by a recovery partition I will never use. I have tried to shrink or get rid of it in Windows, but it is a "System Active Primary Partition" and this apparently means no windows tool will touch it.

I was wondering if anyone has had success reclaiming some of that space, I know normally windows requires a separate 100 meg System partition, so I might not be able to delete it, but I should be able to shrink it.

Any advice?

 

You should be able to delete the recovery partition by using a Windows disk, you can go through the installation then change/delete partitions as you see fit in the partition manager, then quit the windows installation without actually having installed anything.
Or you can use tools like Acronis, Gparted, etc to manage the partitions

 

I would advise you to NOT interfere with partition layout after Windows is installed. Windows is kinda "sensitive" in these things (especially growing the Windows Partition) and causes problems which would require a bit of advanced it-knowledge to solve (and like with all partitioning operations, you would have the risk of loosing all data).

But if you are comfortable with formatting and starting a fresh OS (maybe copy all files you still need to a external HDD) then you could get rid of it quite easy.

Either way, the first thing you would need is portable Linux OS like Download | Ubuntu or a more specialized solution like http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php and a Thumbdrive to install it on.
From here you could use gParted to edit your partitions.

 

I am pretty comfortable with the technical side of this, and I have a full system image if anything goes wrong, so I can return to my current state easily enough. I would really like to reclaim that space though, and I would rather not need to reinstall at this point, I have it pretty much setup like I want it.

I guess I was just hoping someone else had done this before, I will probably mess with this later, I actually have 2 systems right now since I am doing an exchange, so I can freely try this on the system I am sending back without worrying about killing my data and needing to reimage.

Does anyone know if the Windows disk allows me to expand a partition? If it does I would just use it, if not I will use a different tool.

 

If you think you are up to the task its pretty straight forward:
Use gParted to delete the Partition
Use gParted to grow the Partition over the now free space
Boot from the Windows Disk, select Repair option, select command Prompt
Type in these Commands:

Code:

bootrec /fixMBR
bootrec /fixBoot
bootrec /rebuildBCD

This should do the trick. IF it doesn't, your only option is to edit the MBR etc. manually :/ A tedious task.

If i recall it correctly there is a button called "extend Partition" BUT i think it creates an extended Partition, which is not what you want.
Setting up a bootable Linux Thumbdrive just takes a few minutes (excluding donwload).