Guest Posted November 19, 2014 Share Posted November 19, 2014 Hey guys, I have the SP2 with 64GBs of storage, but that has started to run quite low nowadays. Setting my dev environment (Unity and VS Community with only the things that I need for .NET and Unity dev) has left me with about 7GBs of free space. If I remove the restore partition to an USB drive, which I heard can be done in order to free up some space, will there be any negatives to doing that? I don't really care about using that restore partition since the OS residing in it is in Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Norwegian, as I bought this Surface from Sweden, and I have been using an English ISO to basically install the English version of Windows 8.1. So if I remove the partition, or move it to an USB device, can I still reinstall the OS later and have it successfully activate? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShadeOfBlue Posted November 20, 2014 Share Posted November 20, 2014 If you've reinstalled Windows then the recovery partition will not be associated with the current install. Therefore, the typical "Create a recovery drive" method will not work. There are ways of getting it to work again, but it sounds like you want the English version anyway. You could backup the partition using any drive imaging software if you wanted (just to save it for later), but then it could just be removed. Afterward, you could increase the size of the main partition to fill the empty space left behind. The Windows 8 product key is stored in the firmware. The existence or absence of the recovery partition will not affect product activation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 20, 2014 Share Posted November 20, 2014 The Windows 8 product key is stored in the firmware. The existence or absence of the recovery partition will not affect product activation. Great. Then I will just kill it. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Supervisor Posted November 20, 2014 Supervisor Share Posted November 20, 2014 Hello, A few things to keep in mind: You can gain back some disk space by disabling hibernation, if you don't use it. A hibernation file is about the same size as the amount of RAM installed in your computer, so that's another 4GB of space you can free up. To disable hibernation, open an elevated Command Prompt (filename: CMD.EXE) and issue a "powercfg -h off" command. Likewise, you can run the Disk Cleanup Wizard (filename: CLEANMGR.EXE) to free up some additional disk space by removing unneeded files. Make at least one copy of the USB flash drive containing the restore partition. That way if it fails, you'll still have a copy you can reload. Microsoft now allows you to download the recovery media for Surface models. You can find details on Microsoft's web site at microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/downloadablerecoveryimage. You might want to keep a copy of that around, too. Even though the Surface Pro 2 has a MicroSD card slot and USB port, I wouldn't installing apps to a MicroSD Card or USB flash drive in case they fail. Likewise, any data you store there should be backed up as well. The more copies the better, if it is particularly valuable data. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 20, 2014 Share Posted November 20, 2014 ... Thanks for the link! Will download and keep it on my laptop in case I need it for some reason. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted November 27, 2014 Share Posted November 27, 2014 Hmm, I copied and removed the 6GBs recovery partition. But I cannot extend the system partition since the space is not continuous. There is a 350MBs recovery partition between the system partition and the unallocated space. Basically, this is the structure: 350MB Recovery Partition 200MB EFI System Partition 52GB Primary Partition 350 Recovery Partition 6GB unallocated space Any ideas what those two 350MB recovery partitions are used for, and can they or the second one be deleted so that I could extend the primary one? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whs37 Posted December 2, 2014 Share Posted December 2, 2014 I never keep the recovery partition. I make frequent images. With some manufacturers you have to watch out though. E.g. Dell put the bootmgr into the recovery partition (in Win7). Before you delete that partition, you better copy that bootmgr to C. goretsky 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShadeOfBlue Posted December 3, 2014 Share Posted December 3, 2014 Both of those partitions house the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). The first recovery partition is the one that was there from the factory. The second 350MB partition serves the same function, except it was created when you installed Windows yourself. If you had started with a blank drive, then it would have placed that partition before the main partition. As it stands, it was forced to steal 350MB from the end of the partition you were installing to. You can delete it using the diskpart command line tool. Just be aware that if you try (or Windows automatically tries) to boot into the recovery environment, it's not going to work. If you have the Windows 8.1 setup on a bootable USB drive, you can always use that as your recovery environment should the need arise. As with most things, there are even more elegant ways of doing it. You can move some files around, run some commands, and get a working WinRE on the first partition. It just depends on if it's worth the effort for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 6, 2014 Share Posted December 6, 2014 I wiped the whole thing. Booted from a USB and then removed every partition, and just installed, so now I have 3 partitions, a recovery one, the EFI one, and the primary one, and I got back those 6GBs that were originally reserved for the restore partition. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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