How To Delete Recovery Partition?
Introduction
Recovery Partition” is a hidden partition on your hard drive. Recovery partitions are designed to reinstall the original operating system in case you delete the existing OS by accident, make a mistake or any other reason to recover the deleted operating system.
This partition can be used as long as it is not damaged or deleted. However, if you want to install Windows 7 again after deleting the existing OS, you would have to find another bootable media such as an installation CD.
Use of Recovery Partition
You can use your recovery partition when your Windows 7 is broken or corrupted. Recovery partitions are used in situations where the user must perform a complete reinstallation of the operating system, but you want to keep all installed software and personal files intact.
How to Delete via Bootable CD
Step 1: Insert Bootable CD or Bootable USB.
Step 2: Reboot your computer and go to the BIOS screen (during booting, you will see a message appear like “Press F2 to enter Setup”).
Step 3: Go into BIOS settings and change the boot order so that your USB is first booted and then by CD Drive; save changes and exit BIOS .
Step 4: Once you enter the Windows RE environment, use Diskpart utility to delete all partitions on the hard drive. To do this, open Command Prompt window under System Recovery Options menu as administrator (right-click on it and select Run as administrator). Then type the following command “disk part” without quotes followed by “list volume”, then press Enter.
Step 5: Now you will see the list of volumes (volumes) along with their corresponding drive letters, locate the volume labeled as “Recovery” or “WindowsRE” by its drive letter and note it down (for example D). Type exit to close the command prompt window.
Step 6: To delete this volume, type “delete volume #” without quotes followed by Enter, then replace # with the number noted in Step 5 (for example, if your recovery partition is on Volume 2 then type “delete volume 2” without quotes and press Enter). Once deleted, restart your computer and Windows 7 should start normally. If deleting Recovery Partition using Diskpart utility did not work for you; use MiniTool Partition Wizard to delete Recovery Partition on your hard drive.
MiniTool Partition Wizard is a complete hard disk partition management utility that can be used to not only create, resize/move, merge, split, wipe and delete partitions with ease but also maintain an optimal disk usage with the Smartly Organized feature. It supports MBR and GPT disk format along with FAT12/16/32 and NTFS/NTFS5 file systems. While creating or resizing partitions, it provides protection for existing data on the drive by filling up unallocated space with 0s (zeros).
MiniTool Partition Wizard has many other advanced features like converting dynamic disk to basic, changing cluster size of NTFS file system, etc. It even allows you to modify your boot manager and fix errors in it.
How To Delete Using MiniTool Partition Wizard
Step 1: Download and install MiniTool Partition Wizard.Select the recovery partition you want to delete, click on the “Delete” button from the toolbar or right-click on it and select the “Delete” option from the menu.
Step 2: If asked for confirmation, click Yes to continue. The selected Recovery volume will then be deleted without further ado. Close MiniTool Partition Wizard and restart your computer once again to let all changes take effect and enjoy
How To Delete Using CMD
To start Diskpart in Command Prompt window type “diskpart” without quotes at Run Prompt (Windows Logo+R) or search for this tool in Start Menu. After that follow the steps below:
Step 1: Type “list volume” without quotes and press Enter to see a list of currently existing volumes present on your computer. Look for the recovery volume by its drive letter and note it down, you can identify the recovery partition by its size as well (it will have about twice the size of other partitions). Here I’m using D as my recovery drive letter.
Diskpart> list vol Diskpart> list vol Step 2: Now type “select volume 3” where 3 is the number noted in step1; once entered, now type “delete volume” without quotes and wait until it has been successfully deleted from your PC (the selected volume will be deleted right away regardless if it contains any data or not)
Diskpart> sel vol 3 Diskpart> del vol Diskpart> list volume Step 3: Now restart your system and you’ll be able to start Windows normally.
Conclusion
Deleting Recovery Partition using Disk part utility or Command prompt is not that tough and above mentioned steps should help you to complete the task. The MiniTool Partition Wizard also allows you to do other disk related tasks like modifying boot manager, fix errors in boot records and convert dynamic disk back to basic. Thus it’s a good alternative for those who want more control and features while managing partitions.
