Can I delete the EFI/recovery partitions from second drive.

So I've ended up having to do a clean install on my new hard drive, but still have the EFI and recovery partitions on the old one. I'm happily booting from the new drive, so is it ok to delete all this stuff from the old drive that I'm now just going to use for media?

Should I create a new recovery partition on the new drive, and if so how, or is it not really needed?

Many thanks.

 

You can completely format and wipe the old drive including all partitions if you're booting fine from the new SSD that you've cloned it to.

You don't need to touch anything on the new SSD since you've cloned it as I instructed you in the previous post.

 

Thanks. For various reasons though I ended up just doing a completely clean install on the new drive from a USB though, but this has resulted in just the one main partition.

 

Then you need to reformat!! If you took the time to read the stick in this forum of the clean installation guide, it clearly mentions to only have one drive connected while installing Windows otherwise Windows will place the system partitions and boot files on the 2nd drive which in this case is your slow HDD so you will have slower boot time and you will not be able to backup your OS using imaging tools such as Macrium Reflect since you have the system files scattered all over the place.

These specific instructions are located in post 2 of that thread and there is an update to the guide which will show you how you can install Windows on a system which has multiple drives without having to physically remove the other drive(s) whilst still keeping all the system partitions and boot files on your main drive:

Update: solution to install Windows while multiple drives are present without having the boot files placed on the 2nd or 3rd drive present in the system: How to properly install Windows on a system with multiple drives

 

Thanks. What I don't quite understand though, is if a drive isn't the boot drive, does it have no need for the EFI partition then?

 

It doesn't, here's how mine looks:

 

Ok, so I now have something that looks like this



Which seems much better, but I'm still missing a roughly 13GB recovery partition that was on the other drive. Is this something that I should try and replace, and if so how, or do I not need it?

As for the other drive, I assume when I put it back in I can just format the whole thing?

Thanks so much for your help so far, this is my first new windows laptop in probably 12 years, and I'm just feeling a bit lost.

 

I don't think you can retrieve that recovery partition back onto C: if it was created on the second drive (the HDD) during installation so now all you can do is use your system as it is or do another format but before you do that you can either partition your SSD into C: and D: OR simply wipe the 2nd drive using diskpart with the /clean command, that way it isn't initialized and thus, the Windows setup cannot talk to that drive and will not copy anything to it, once you're in Windows and launch Disk Management, you will be asked to initialize it (either as MBR or GPT) and then you can format it and create a partition.

 

Sorry, so this latest installation was done just with the new drive in the system, so it shouldn't have known anything about what was on the other drive, right? (the D in the picture is just the SD card I installed from). Is that recovery partition something I need?

 

The recovery partition is only needed if you plan to restore Windows back to its factory state just like a quick re-installation without the installation media so don't worry too much about it.