Safely Copy Recovery Partition to USB before Deleting It

Recovery partition take too much space

Do you think the recovery partition on your hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) is taking up your disk space? You can actually copy recovery partition to USB drive and delete recovery partition to free up space. If you have a small HDD or SSD, disk space is more precious.

After running Windows 10/8/7 for a long while, Windows update, system files, page files, installed programs, and your personal files may have use a lot of your disk space. Besides Windows recovery partition, some brands of computers have a factory recovery partition (also called OEM recovery partition), which will usually consume more than 10GB of free space.

Factory recovery partition

Most of the Asus, HP, Dell and Lenovo desktops and laptops have a factory recovery partition. The manufacturer put a compressed image file of the original system in the recovery partition with recovery options included. If your system crashes, you can press a specific key at startup to use the recovery option and restore your computer to factory settings.

You probably do not want to simply remove the factory recovery partition to free up disk space because you may need it to restore your computer after some unexpected system issues. In that case, you can copy the recovery disk to USB drive and then delete the recovery partition made by the manufacturer.

What about Windows recovery partition?

Windows recovery partition only take a few hundred MBs of disk space, and you can view them in Windows Disk Management. In Windows 10, the recovery partition is about 450MB, 200MB in Windows 8/8.1, and 100MB in Windows 7.

You can create a Windows 10 recovery USB disk and then it will give you an option to delete the recovery partition. When your computer needs fixing, you can boot your computer from the recovery USB drive and use the recovery options to repair your PC.

Clone factory recovery partition

To clone the recovery partition, you can use disk partition manager software AOMEI Partition Assistant. It is free and easy to use. Besides, it allows you to delete Windows recovery partition or factory recovery partition and then add the unallocated space to your system partition. Let’s take Asus computer as an example.

Clone Asus recovery partition to USB drive:

1. Download this free software. Here AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is recommended because it is free and easy to use.

2. Open this freeware. In its main interface, right click on the Recovery Partition and select “Copy Partition”. As you can see, it provide a Disk Copy feature. If you need to uprade your hard drive to SSD or larger HDD without reinstalling, that option is very helpful.

3. In a pop up window, select Copy Partition Quickly. You can also select Sector-by-Sector Copy if you like, but it will take more time and space because it will also copy unused space on the recovery partition.

4. Select an unallocated partition as the Destination Space. If your USB drive has no unallocated space, you can resize a partition on the USB disk or delete a partition to generate unallocated space.

5. Drag your mouse pointer to resize partition. You can keep it or adjust it to full size in accordance with your needs. When every preparation is completed, click Finish.

6. Back to the main screen, click “Apply” to apply these steps.

In a short while, it will finishing copying the recovery partition. After that, you can right click on the recovery partition and select “Delete Partition” to remove the recovery partition. Besides saving the compressed factory image, you can also create a system imageof your current Windows system to external hard drive.