Delete the Windows recovery partition on a Lenovo Thinkpad or Desktop
Recovery drive partition removal
If you’ve purchased a laptop from Lenovo or desktop from Asus, there’s a good chance there’s a hidden recovery partition immediately after the boot sector. The recovery drive’s existence isn’t normally a problem, but if you ever clone your system to a larger hard drive, expanding the C drive will be impossible unless the recovery drive is deleted.
Unfortunately, the removal of the Windows recovery drive isn’t straight forward. With standard partitions, you can simply right-click on them from the Windows Disk Management tool and choose delete. But this option is not available for the recovery drive. Instead, you have to open the disk partition tool and run a few diskpart commands.
After the recovery partition is deleted, it will no longer appear in the Windows disk management window.
Recovery partition deletion steps
To delete the recovery partition, open the Windows disk partition tool by typing diskpart into the Windows search bar or the command prompt, and issuing the following commands:
- list disk
- select disk 0
- list partition
- select partition 3
- delete partition override
Lenovo recovery partition deletion
The disk and partition numbers you specify in steps 2 and 3 depend on your computer’s specific configuration.
It’s also noteworthy that the override switch must be used along with the delete partition command, otherwise the recovery drive partition removal operation will fail.
And that’s all there is to it. That’s all you have to do to delete the recovery partition in Windows.