Low Disk Space on Recovery D Partition Explained and Fixed

The Problem

After using your PC or laptop for a while, you may get a warning saying low disk space on recovery D: partition. You are likely to get totally confused about the message, because you don’t even remember when you store anything on that recovery partition. Don’t worry. This article will show you how to find out what is filling the D: drive and how to free more space.

The Cause

Unlike the Windows recovery partition, this kind of recovery partition is built by the computer manufacturers, and, normally, the recovery system will not fill the recovery partition by itself. Therefore, there must be one or more programs writing files to the D: drive, which you don’t know about.

The Solution

To fix this problem, you need to first find out the program behind storage space running out. Then stop the program and remove the files.

To see what is on recovery partition

1. Type “show hidden files” in the search box, and, in the results listed, select Show hidden files and folders. In the pop-out window, check the “Show hidden files, folders, and drives” option, and uncheck the “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” option.

2. Open the recovery partition in File explorer. Based on the file name of the new added files or folders to find out the program behind it.

3. Stop the program and remove the new created files and folders.

If you cannot find any clue through the filename, you can use Windows Defender to do a full scan of your computer to find out the potentially harmful program. If you do not know which files can be removed, you can extend the partition labeled as recovery partition.

Expand the recovery partition

To resize the recovery partition effortlessly, you can use a freeware AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. If there is any unallocated space on the hard drive, you can use the Merge Partition feature to add the unallocated space to the recovery partition. If there is no unallocated space, you can shrink any partition on the same disk to create unallocated space.

1. Download, install and launch this free partition manager software.

2. Right click the recovery partition with low disk space and select "Merge Partitions".

3. In the Merge Partitions screen, check the recovery partition and the unallocated space and click "OK". You can also merge two adjacent partitions into one.

4. Then the program will show the partition layout after the operation. If you are satisfied with it, click the "Apply" button to apply it.

Apart from Merge Partitions, you can also use Resize Partition feature to extend the recovery partition. After that, the low disk space on recovery D partition error is long gone. As a free partition tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant can also be used tomigrate OS to SSD, create Windows 10/8 to Go, convert MBR to GPT without losing data, etc.