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I have an hp pavilion 17 power laptop with windows 10 home pre-installed. Today when I was creating an extra partition for Ubuntu and when I looked at the disk management window I was surprised because it had 4 recovery partitions instead of only one which is showed in the file explorer. multiple (4) recovery partitions in windows 10file explorer in windows 10

Are all of these extra recovery partitions with no drive letter important? Can I safely delete these extra partitions?

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    Are all of these extra recovery partitions with no drive letter important? - Yes; Can I safely delete these extra partitions? - No; Worth pointing out you only have one 24.52 GB Recovery partition. The second "entry" for Recovery (D:) appears to be a glitch of some type. If you touched your partitions with Ubuntu and likely is the reason.
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 18, 2017 at 11:53
  • So the one answer and this comment both say that I should not play with the partitions and leave them alone, right?
    – Bangash
    Commented May 18, 2017 at 15:29
  • @Bangash correct! :-)
    – user725131
    Commented May 19, 2017 at 5:47
  • CAREFUL! My Dell XPS has 6 partitions, three of which (4, 5, and 6) are labeled as "Recovery" partitions. Partition 4 is the true 990MB MIcrosoft recovery partition (found via "reagentc" in PowerShell), but Partitions 5 and 6 are not unused: Partition 5 is a 16GB "Image" volume, and Partition 6 is a 1.4GB "DELLSUPPORT" partition.
    – BoCoKeith
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 23:13

3 Answers 3

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When Windows upgrades to next version it creates a new recovery partition if the previous recovery partition is not big enough for recovery partition size of the upgrade version.

You can find the recovery partition current being used by running this command in elevated PowerShell.

reagentc /info

Finding Windows RE partition

The unused partition can be safely deleted.

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    Do you have any sources to back up your claim (the "if the previous recovery partition is not big enough" part)? I wonder if I can future-proof my disk layout if I don't want Windows to mess with it.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Feb 27, 2018 at 17:58
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    Sad that the only remotely correct answer here was downvoted. As for a source for the claim, see disk-partition.com/windows-10/…
    – Jim Balter
    Commented Apr 18, 2018 at 5:57
  • This is the correct solution. I had 4 recovery partitions on a laptop I recently purchased off eBay. I just needed to know which was actually in use, and which were left over from OEM installation, Win8 -> Win10 upgrades, etc. This solved the problem perfectly. Thanks. :)
    – Jack_Hu
    Commented Jun 10, 2021 at 16:43
  • What if Windows RE status = Disabled? Can you delete all the recovery partitions?
    – Slogmeister Extraordinaire
    Commented Feb 5 at 23:39
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Windows creates a new recovery partition during an re-image and/or on a drive that already has one.

So - easy stuff either leave it alone OR:

  1. https://www.ubackup.com/windows-10/create-windows-10-recovery-disk-4348.html - create a recovery USB
  2. Use a partition manager or DISK PART to move/merge it - https://www.diskpart.com/windows-10/recovery-partition-after-upgrading-to-windows-10-4348.html
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Looks like your SSD has a GPT UEFI partition, which normally consists of:

450MB recovery partition
100MB EFI System Partition
16MB MSR partition
C drive.

If you delete those partitions your computer will not know how to boot into Windows etc.

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    The recovery partitions have nothing do to with booting.
    – Jim Balter
    Commented Apr 18, 2018 at 5:58

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