How to Delete a Recovery Partition

Have a Hard Drive or SSD with a recovery partition that you can’t delete through disk management MMC? This short guides for you!

First I want to explain why this partition exists, to give you an understanding of the consequences of deleting it. This partition exists to restore your system to either it’s out-of-factory state or recover windows to a fresh state, keeping your data intact. If you’re planning on selling your system in the future or want an easy method to clean it then it can be useful to keep the recovery partition hanging around. However if you’ve removed the drive from your system then deleting it is advisable as it takes up precious space on the drive.

Time to explain in 7 simple steps how to remove this nuisance partition from your drive.

1. Right click the Start menu and open Windows Powershell (Admin), click Yes in the UAC prompt.
2. Type diskpart
3. Lists disks by typing list disk
4. select your disk number with select disk # (# being the disk number you want to select)
5. Type list partition to view a list of the partitions
6. Select your partition number with select partition # (again, # being the partition number you want to select)
7. Now, double check you have the right partition and then type delete partition override.

The recovery partition will now be deleted and you can go about your day!

Interested in more Windows Storage related topics? Check out my post on Windows Storage Spaces in Server 2016!