When you have a Windows 11 installed, there are some hidden partitions on your disk. These partitions may not have any drive letter assigned, still they serve as a tool kit for your Windows 11. One of these hidden partitions is the Recovery Partition. The Recovery Partition is specifically helpful for recovery purposes and have recovery tools and factory installation files. When you opt to Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE), it is the recovery partition which is behind the scene and handling everything.
Since Recovery Partition serves as a tool during the recovery process, deleting the Recovery Partition is not recommended option. However, under certain scenarios, you might want to delete the recovery partition. Even once you delete the recovery partition, you can add it back.
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Why you might need to delete Recovery Partition in Windows 11
Now you might be wondering one would attempt to delete the Recovery Partition? To explain this, I want to share you an example. So I am on a Windows 11 system. Now below is the screenshot for Disk Management snap-in on this device.
You can clearly see that we have recovery partition listed next to the Windows 11 operating system drive. The system I am on, has limited disk space. I want to extend the C: drive and include the unallocated space. But I can’t do this, since we have the recovery partition very next to the C: drive. I can only extend the system root drive, that is C: drive when it is having the unallocated space exactly right of it.
At the moment, we have the recovery partition in between the C: drive and the unallocated space. So in this case, we need to delete the Recovery Partition.
Force delete the Recovery Partition in Windows 11
Manual steps
Since the Recovery Partition is a system partition, you cannot directly delete it inside the Disk management snap-in. To complete this process, you can use the Command-line tool, called DISKPART.
Here are the steps you need to follow:
1. Open the administrative Command Prompt.
2. Type diskpart and press the Enter key.
3. Next type list disk to list disk connected to your device.
4. Now type select disk # and replace the # with exact disk number.
5. Then type list partition to list available disk partitions.
6. Next, use select partition # command and substitute the # with the recovery partition number.
7. Finally, execute delete partition override command and recovery partition will be deleted.
Checking back with Disk Management, the recovery partition is now deleted.
Video guide
Here is the video guide to help you more on this:
