Recovery partition

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I was faffing about on my Laptop and was in Disk Management and noticed i have two recovery partitions...one is 600MB and the other is 14.16GB!

Why is this? oh I upgraded to Windows 10

 

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Pretty sure that it used to be that the smaller partition was the boot image for carrying out the recovery and the larger partition was the software repo, of course I could be wrong.

Generally speaking I have always deleted these to free up space.

 

Simon, yes correct. The OEM that installed the operating system creates a recovery partition with an image of the base OS on it in a Windows (WIM) image file (the 14Gb partition). The 600Mb partition is the WinRE partition. When recovery is needed the computer boots to the WinRE partition and applies the image to the partition with the windows files (boot partition). Result is fresh installation of Windows.

 

Just to add to this post if it of any use. The recovery parition that the OEM creates will be a Windows image with all the usual bloatware rubbish on it. With a bit of fiddling about you can create your own Windows 10 build with your own customisations and create a WIM of it using DISM and use that image as a recovery image. You can copy this to the recovery partition and boot to WinRE or WinPE and use your image. I have an image of my Windows 10 configuration just in case. Of course you can store this image on most media. I have mine on an external HDD.