Replacement of Recovery Drive D: with USB drive

[jvadavi]

My PC has a recovery drive 😧 of 29 GB. Can I replace it with a USB drive (32 GB) and use the space in 😧 drive for other programs/files?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@jvadavi 

Basically -- NO -- it will no longer work if you touch it or move it to a different device.

However, you can consider using a different option to create External recovery media and then remove that partition.

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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 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 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.

[jvadavi]

Thank you for your guidance. I need a further clarification, since I am a computer novice.  Does removing the partition mean that the space will get integrated into C: drive? I would prefer to keep a separate 😧 drive for some of my programs and data. Is this possible?