How do I move a partition to the beginning of a drive in Windows?

1

I just did a clean install of Windows 10 on my laptop, and Windows places a 450MB recovery partition at the beginning of my boot drive.

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Is there a way to delete the recovery partition, and reallocate the space to the "C:" partition? AOMEI, EaseUS, etc., claim to have this capability, but in fact do not; none of the utilities that I can find will move the partition with the active operating system. This makes sense. Is there a command-line utility or a boot loader that will move the partitions before the OS is loaded?

the_meter413

Posted 2018-02-04T01:53:34.093

Reputation: 157

The first two partitions normally contain import operating system files. It always causes issues by deleting them. If you had a 10GB drive, I could understand why you would want to delete them. But with another nearly 700GB free, its not worth the effort and risk. If you was to delete it, all the contents of your drive would have to be moved forward by 450MB to add it to the end of the C: partition. – mt025 – 2018-02-04T04:33:49.540

Answers

0

You can avoid this problem by doing the partitioning yourself before the Windows install which you can do from diskpart from the console (Shift + F10 in the Installer or recovery environment or you can do it with a Linux live cd using parted of fdisk.

However its probably good idea to keep the ESP somewhere around 256MiB to future proof it for multi-boot systems. Further I would create the recovery partition after the Windows partition anyway so you have it. It's then trivial to delete it later and resize the Windows partition.

If you want to keep the current system intact you can either use gparted to move all the data over or you can use diskclone to copy all of the allocated data only to another disk or partition.

jdwolf

Posted 2018-02-04T01:53:34.093

Reputation: 1 974

Does diskpart from the console offer different options than the GUI disk partitioner that appears during a "custom" install? I completely removed all existing drive partitions when using the GUI installer, but there were no options whatsoever for a recovery partition let alone where it should place it on the HDD. – the_meter413 – 2018-02-04T05:48:56.293

There was an option to create your own partition(s) and that's the point of this answer. All Windows needs (in modern hardware) is the ESP (EFI partition) and a big enough NTFS partition. If you let the installer do this it will always create a recovery partition as well. – None – 2018-02-04T22:44:57.110

Asked: 2018-02-04T01:53:34.093

Viewed: 2 606 times

Active: 2020-02-10T20:02:20.313