Which empty disk partitions can be safely deleted (and thereby extend my C drive to use the space)

[JamesJ]

I have several empty partitions chewing up space on my SSD. Can all be safely deleted? And extend my C to them (they are all "to the right" of my C drive partition). I do know that the EFI System partition is important, even when empty. Also, the 980mb partition was apparently created during my most recent BIOS update (update process didn't remove it, grr).

[WAWood]

JamesJ

I know it's a PERSONAL choice, but I find Recovery partitions on the PC's drive to be a waste of space.  After all, if the drive goes bad, that will also corrupt the Recovery partition -- rendering it useless.

I choose to image my PC to an external drive using a third-party tool; this way, if the drive goes bad, I can either restore or replace it, and not lose anything important.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 10 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.

Once you have the Backup stuff created, you can remove the Recovery partition and reclaim the space.

Good Luck

[JamesJ]

Thank you; I'm asking about currently "empty" partitions, as at the present time I'm keeping the OEM Recovery drive (D) and planning to extend my C drive with the apparently empty space of the partitions "between" C and D. Elsewhere I note some comments about W10 disk management reporting partitions as empty when in fact they are not; so my first step will be to explore the contents of each. Assuming they are in-fact empty, is the step-by-step as follows: Delete each empty partition, starting with the one to the right of C, then expand C to the now unallocated space?

[VarlarMorghuli]

Yes. Delete each empty partition, starting with the one to the right of C, then expand C to the now unallocated space.

the unallocated space has to be contiguous. if you ever want to add the recovery partition to C drive, you have to delete all the partitions between C drive and recovery partition.

[JamesJ]

Thank you; using a third-party utility I've examined the "empty" partitions and discovered they are partially occupied (the Disk Management utility of W10 apparently does not properly report the usage of some of these partitions). I note the 980mb "Recovery Partition" (not to be confused with the Recovery volume D) has some of the HP system utilities that allow Recovery options at boot. I'm going to try to examine the contents of the large (8gb) partitions with the "RAW" file system. Other chatter on the Internet says Anniversary Edition of W10 was causing some useful files to get thrown in such partitions.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

Any space that says "RAW" indicates that Windows can not make sense of that partition, so it can't read it.  That will prevent you from examining the contents.

You can remove such partitions without concerns.

Good Luck

[PeteB-UK]

Just because windows cannot make sense of it, how are we sure that it's not used at boot time (i.e. pre-load of Windows?). 

Personally I think HP should offer a way to tidy up after BIOS updates, I've lost well over 10Gb on a relatively small SDD "for recovery" and I'm always very nervous about removing it.