Recovery partition removed but left a small partition behind

[Matt]

Hi Guys,

I decided to move the recovery portion off my SP1 to free up some space. I followed the Microsoft guidelines and transferred it to a USB drive using the wizard. The wizard offered to remove the partition for me.

This is fine except it has created a new F: partition that's 7GB in size. Looking at the disk management the disk has a 450mb recovery partition in between the C: and F: partitions. This is preventing me from expanding the drive and actually using the new space. I am unable to remove this little partition. If I right click on it the context menu only shows Help.

Any ideas?

Matt

 

[Matt]

Found a similar article here

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...thy-efi-system-partition?forum=w8itproinstall


The suggestion is to use DISKPART to force removal of the partition. Scary stuff.

 

[Matt]

Following the instructions I was to work out what was needed and removed the little partition. Now I have extended my C: and have a healthy 11GB free space again.

Hope this is helpful for anyone in the future. The steps are:

Run CMD
DISKPART to load the DISKPART utility
Rescan - checks for all drives
List Disk - should show disk 0 and disk 1 (if you have an SD card mounted)
Select disk 0 (as long as that's your OS drive)
List Part - will list all partitions
Select partition x (x should be replaced by the partition list number from List Part - mine was 5, I used the size of the partitions to identify the correct partition)
Delete partition override - removes the partition forcefully

Once complete close diskpart and open computer management (control panel - administrative tools) select disk management. In my case the F: was already formatted so I right click deleted it. Once it showed as empty space I right clicked C: and chose extend partition. Follow the wizard to expand the drive to the maximum size.

Job done!