Two Windows Recovery Partitions

[Jason-_-H]

So looking around in Disk Manager, I saw there were two Recovery Partitions. So that got me thinking, why is there two partitions? Turns out one was for Windows 8, my original OS and the other is for Windows 10. 

So my question, how do I know which partition is the one that Windows 10 uses and which one is the one used by Windows 8 since I'm planning on deleting the one that isn't necessary since there's no point in downgrading at this point.

^If it's even possible to know.

[WAWood]

@Jason-_-H 

A problem you have with the built-in Recovery partition is that if the hard drive suffers any kind of failure, not only can you then NOT boot into Windows anymore, you also can't do a recovery.  So, you're stuck with a nonworking PC.

If you use external recovery media on a USB stick, you don't have this issue -- and you get to free up the space used by the recovery partition(s).  This is not a big deal on a 2TB hard drive, but can free up much needed space on a smaller SSD.

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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.

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Also, NOW you remove and recover the space from both recovery partitions as you no longer need them.