Windows 8 Can I get rid of the recovery partitions? If yes, how?

[white_Shadoww]

My Windows 8.1 laptop has 4 recovery partitions. Which I think are way too many. I want to delete them and merge the space with other drives. What are they for and why do i need 4? Can I delete them all? Or perhaps keep just one if it is necessary?

 

[patcooke]

You may delete the recovery partitions but first you must burn a set of recovery dvd's. (You should already have done this anyway!) The recovery partition is your only means of recovering your system in the case of a catastrophic disk failure or other serious problems which may render your system unbootable. You may also need to run a recovery if you ever decide to sell the machine on. Having burned a set of recovery disks make a second copy and keep them in separate places (no I'm not paranoid - I had just too many experiences of desperately need to run a recovery only to find a crc error on the optical recovery disk! Once you have done that use something like easeus partition manager (free download) to delete the recovery partition and reassign the space as required.

 

[white_Shadoww]

You mean make a recovery drive? Yes, I've done that. And I'm also going to make a bootable 8.1 USB drive. So if I did that, I'm all okay?

 

[patcooke]

As long as you've got a viable system for getting your op sys fully up and running then ok. You may also be interested in system imaging using something like Macrium Reflect (also free). Enables yo so save a complete image of your system drive including all updates and installed apps to recover not just to factory settings but your entire system as is.

 

[white_Shadoww]

Thanks, I think I can get rid of them then.

 

[Saltgrass]

You may want to be careful, since a Recovery partition has different uses. One will normally hold the factory recovery image, which you would not need if you had other system recovery options. But the others or at least one other, holds the instructions for the system to be able to enter the Recovery environment. I would leave the small ones alone.

And please, if you have a UEFI install, do not use EaseUS........

 

[verachen]

You may delete the recovery partitions but first you must burn a set of recovery dvd's. (You should already have done this anyway!) The recovery partition is your only means of recovering your system in the case of a catastrophic disk failure or other serious problems which may render your system unbootable. You may also need to run a recovery if you ever decide to sell the machine on. Having burned a set of recovery disks make a second copy and keep them in separate places (no I'm not paranoid - I had just too many experiences of desperately need to run a recovery only to find a crc error on the optical recovery disk! Once you have done that use something like easeus partition manager (free download) to delete the recovery partition and reassign the space as required.

Great, in addition to easeus partition manager, also aomei partition assistant and gparted are both ok for partition management.