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So I used to have a partition mounted as F:, and it was my old Mac's hard drive (Disk3 in the screenshot below) using a a free HFS+ driver I found when running Windows 8. I've never been able to mount that partition since updating to Windows 10, so naturally haven't seen that drive letter in a while.

Recently however, I started getting windows popups about disk F: having low space... this was news since it's not supposed to be there, but it turns out that there's a 450MB partition on my main SSD that's being mounted as F:, and I swear I'd never noticed it prior to this behaviour. What's even more odd is that if I right-click on it in Disk Management the only option is "Help...", i.e. I can't change drive letter assignments etc.

Does anybody know if a recent update would have introduced this, and whether or not I can safely delete it?

Disk management showing the new partition

Matt Lacey
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1 Answers1

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It looks like a recovery partition. Windows installer and updates create it when there's not enough space on the original partition. It shouldn't have a drive letter assigned by default.

It's generally not safe to delete. Windows will stop you from modifying this partition from UI by disabling context menu items.

If you want to sacrifice OS recoverability for disk space, you can disable recovery using reagentc.exe and delete the partition with diskpart.

How to remote the drive letter:

  1. Press Windows key, type diskpart and press Enter. Confirm running diskpart if asked.

  2. Type list volume and confirm it with Enter (all commands onwards are confirmed with Enter). A list of volumes will be printed to the console.

  3. Identify the recovery partition by the letter in the second column. Take note of its number in the first column.

  4. Use the command select volume <NUM> to select recovery partition. Substitute <NUM> with appropriate number from previous step.

  5. Issue the command remove all to remove drive letter. This will NOT remove the partition, just the letter!

  6. Finally, use command exit to quit diskpart.

gronostaj
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