What about recovery partitions after upgrading to Win11?

[jimh12345]

This PC came with Win10; I recently upgraded to Win11.   I see that my system has 2 recovery partitions, one of which is for "HP One Key" and the other a Windows recovery partition.   I've never had to use either.  But now that I've upgraded to Win11, what's the status of those partitions?  Should I keep them, or delete them and create a new recovery option for Windows 11?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@jimh12345 

I don't know specifically about upgrading from Win10 to Win11, but I do know that upgrading a Win7 PC to Win10 corrupts the HP Recovery partition in the process so after that, you can not do a rollback or recovery.  I presume it is the same with Win10 to Win11.

I would get rid of BOTH partitions (presuming you want to stay with Win11) and read the info below about creating your own recovery media:

I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
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 60% 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 24GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 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.

[itsmyname]

@jimh12345 -- in addition to the good advice provided by @WAWood , there is an alternative.

Open:

the "Disk Management" app.

Carefully, select one of those "old" partitions, and choose to DELETE the partition.

If there now is "free space" immediately adjacent to the "C:" partition, 

select the "C:" partition, and then you can use the "expand" function to append that free-space to the tail-end of the "C:" partition.