How To Delete A Healthy Recovery Partition?

Introduction

A Healthy Recovery Partition is a hidden partition on your hard drive. It is the first one to start up whenever you turn on your computer. This partition stores all data which you might need if you reinstall windows or make a system restore.

Delete Healthy Recovery Partition

If you want to delete this partition, there are two ways of doing it:

1. Format hard drive and install windows again.

2. Open the start-up menu and delete the Healthy Recovery Partition from there. This is the easiest way to delete this partition,

Format hard drive and install windows again.:

1. Go to your start menu and right click on “my computer”

2. Choose manage and open Disk Management window

3. You will see all the partitions on your hard drive there. Find the Healthy Recovery Partition (It has 100 MB size)

4. Right click on it and choose delete volume, then confirm deletion of the healthy recovery partition by choosing yes . After that you need to extend primary partition or create new logical partition so that windows can be installed again on it. It must have at least 30 GB space for the OS installation..

5. Format hard drive with NTFS mode before installing windows again ..(Note – if you install Windows7 64-bit version, format with NTFS mode while installing)

Open the start-up menu and delete the Healthy Recovery Partition from there.

This is the easiest way to delete this partition,

1. Go to your windows start menu and choose “All Programs”

2. Find a folder named “Accessories” in it, open that folder and click on “Run”, then type ‘msconfig’ without quotes in the run box and press enter . Note – If you are using Windows XP, go to Run from Start Menu . Then type msconfig in it. A window named with system configuration will be opened..

3. There will be a tab named “startup”. In that list there will be an item named as “healthy_recovery_disk”, which means Healthy Recovery Partition is enabled for start-up ..so remove it by right clicking on it and choosing disable . Then click on apply followed by ok to save your changes.

Now reboot your computer and you will find the healthy recovery partition is deleted from the start-up list..

4. After that go back to the Disk management window, where a healthy recovery partition was present, right click on it and choose delete volume . Windows will ask confirmation for deletion of the Healthy Recovery Partition, choose yes ..and then windows must show a popup asking to extend primary partition or create new logical partition as 30 GB space is not enough..so format disk again with NTFS mode before installing windows.

5. Follow instructions from 1 to 4 as above if Windows starts normally after this process without any errors…Then you can install windows on the empty space.

(That’s why if you reinstall windows , it will take less time to install as all components, out of which Healthy Recovery Partition stores most data, are deleted.)

If You Get An Error In The Step 4 or 5 While Installing Windows

In that case your disk might contain a bad sector .That’s why windows is unable to extend primary partition or create new logical partition .To fix this type chkdsk /r in cmd window and press enter followed by y key. Then wait till it fixes all bad sectors and starts up normally ..then try again to follow step 1-5 for deleting healthy recovery partitions.

Use of Healthy Recovery Partition :

If your computer is infected by a virus and you want to make system restore , first recover space on the hard drive which has been occupied by the healthy recovery partition and then follow steps from 1-5 as given above to delete the Healthy Recovery Partition .

After that, press the F8 button while booting up the computer and select “Repair Your Computer” from the Boot menu. Then select Windows installation which was installed earlier , click next and choose install/reinstall windows option..windows will ask confirmation for restart, choose yes or ok ..and then it starts restoring computer like when you reinstall windows. You can use this method if normal start-up doesn’t work normally after deleting REcovery Partition without getting any error..Your data would be saved from being lost if you initially create a backup of your hard drive ..

Conclusion

If you want to know the reason for creating healthy recovery partitions, then it’s good for making system restore easily and quickly in case your computer is infected. But there is no need to use this item, as we can make system restore by using the start-up menu or F8 option freely. Windows 7 already has an efficient start-up method..so Healthy Recovery Partition is again a useless thing which occupies some space on the hard drive and reduces some speed ..and its only purpose is just to store data of Last Known Good Configuration and System Restore.

That’s why if we delete the healthy recovery partition completely from our disk while installing windows7 , then after some time when we want to create a system restore point ,it will take some time to respond as there are currently no healthy recovery partitions present on our hard drive..but if you want to use system restore again, without creating a backup of your data, then just recover space occupied by healthy recovery partition and follow the above Method to delete it ..and this will speed up process.