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This is my first question, so please let me know if I'm missing something.

Long story short, I messed up one of my Windows 10 installation on another SSD and ended up with a Windows system drive too small to do anything and it's causing issues. I have data I'd rather not lose in this drive, so I'm reluctant to do a fresh reinstall (I've made a disk image backup just in case anything happens during this fix attempt, though)

Screenshot of Minitool Partition Wizard showing DISK 3 GPT and the partitions: E:COLLEGE (NTFS) | (NTFS) 509MB | (FAT32) 100MB | (OTHER) 16MB | F:COLLEGE_VOL2 (NTFS)

I've looked up tutorials online to move the Recovery Partition and the EFI System partition (re: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/666256/move-efi-partition-to-the-left/) but I'm unsure what to do with the 16MB part, and it's unfortunately in the way of resizing the F: partition.

Question:

  1. If I were to make a 625MB partition on the back of the E: disk and simply copy the unlabeled partitions there (disk management reports these as "Recovery Partition" and "EFI System partition" and doesn't show the 16MB partition; Minitool reports the 16MB part as "Other") then delete it, would this cause any issues? What should I do after copying the partitions? I have a feeling that simply deleting them will cause issues because they won't be recognized, and I'm worried it'll end up unbootable with a broken recovery environment.

Screenshot of what I'm trying to do in Minitool

I have an Ubuntu installation with GParted on another drive if needed. Running "reagentc.exe /disable" in Windows 10 with an elevated CMD throws up Error 70, so I'm not sure whether that will also cause issues too, if any?

Please let me know if any wording or questions are confusing. Thanks in advance!

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    Essentially speaking none of the "non-main" partitions are crucial. You should be able to rebuild the EFI partition with bcdboot. Just make sure it has the correct partition type (GUID), otherwise the main installation might be broken after a failed boot due to the wrong type. Personally I have been living without the other two (by installing with diskpart/dism/bcdboot) since I never saw the point of them. I am not a heavy Windows user though and I reinstall every couple months.
    – Tom Yan
    Commented May 26, 2022 at 5:34

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You have an image. Format the main drive and partition it how you like, then use dd to write out of the image back to the partitions, then fix/"grow" the partitions with gparted, all will be as was before. Windows may have a tanty because it doesn't like change but should fix itself.

Personally I'd just do a clean install, then copy whatever files you need out of the image.

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