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Hi,
I have (hopefully) an easy question to answer?
We backup a number of Windows 2012 & 2016 servers using an older backup application that pre-dates these server OS's. The software can back them up ok, however it mentions that these servers contain a recovery partition and in order to back them up and later restore them correctly, they need to have a drive letter assigned.
Given this is a system reserved partition, I'm a little wary of assigning a drive letter to them in case it ends up causing issues with the server now or down the track.
I've searched around to see if there's any advice either for or against doing this, but with no luck.
Can anyone out there advise if this is a good or bad thing to do?
Thread source link: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c3d15f65-65ef-41d7-8d71-c8d377698b9f/will-adding-a-drive-letter-to-the-recovery-partition-cause-issues?forum=windowsbackup
Hi,
Thanks for posting in our forum!
First, Recovery partition is a special partition on system hard drive and is used to restore the system to factory settings in the event of system issues. To protect recovery partition from being changed or deleted, recovery partition usually has no drive letter, and only a Help option is provided in Disk Management.
The recovery partition is typically a special recovery partition that is not meant to be browsed. Assigning a drive letter would gain you nothing.
So, I don't recommend that you assign drive letters to the recovery partition. Of course, we can safely delete the recovery partition. If you insist on doing so.
In fact, For average users, it is better to keep the recovery partition as it is in the hard drive, as such a partition won't take up too much space. And if system gets corrupted or damaged or offers poor performance, users can turn to recovery partition for help instead of spending time reinstalling the operating system.
But for advanced computer users, they may delete recovery partition optionally, provided they have one of the following things: a recovery drive, a recent system image backup or Windows installation CD. Normally, as time goes by, more and more personal files and applications are saved on the system partition, yet a recovery partition is useful only to return the drive to its factory state, which is not as useful as a recent backup.
In a nutshell, recovery partition is viewed as your LAST resort when you have system problems as it will wipe out all your data and programs in system partition. Besides, although some software allows you to add drive letter to manage recovery partition, you should not attempt to store or alter files in it, for this can cause the system recovery process to fail.
For more information, please see here:
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/delete-recovery-partition.html
Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Hope this information can help you, if you have any question, please feel free to let me know.
Best Regards,
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The prime goal of adding drive letter is not to modify partition content but to move recovery partitions such that Primary partition becomes to the left of Unallocated space and so it become possible to extend Primary partition by merging Unallocated space in. After this is done Recovery partition could be made hidden again if this is a concern. So the question remains. What are implications besides potential risk of modification due to drive letter assignment and is there any detrimental effect of moving recovery partitions
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It appears that windows 10 now does this automatically BUT this raises the question (at least for me) since my Unallocated space (200gb) is not the last part of the drive (the recovery partition is) will the drive still be able to use the unallocated space as Overprovisioning to keep the drive running efficiently? I always assumed that
overprovisioned unallocated space had to be at the end of the drive.
I know that some disk partitioning programs can move partitions around for you. Disk management that is built into windows 10 cannot. However I have found that most
free disk partitioning programs on the internet are full of viruses, or are unreliable.
Some people say that you do not even need unallocated space nowadays and that newer drives will automatically be able to use the empty (provisioned) space as if it was unallocated, ie overprovisioned space but I do not know if this is just speculation or fact. If anyone can point me to a reliable source that would be great?
What actually brought me here was I was wondering if I change the drive letter on my external drive which contains my windowsimagebackup, when it comes time for me to use that image backup will windows be able able to find it and run it without error?
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AFAIK you can only extend the partition using spaces behind the partition you want to expand.
However maybe some kind of JBOD (Which works kind of like RAID 0 but instead of storing data in interleaved fashion, it just plainly extend the virtual disk size to allow you expand the partition. The PRO side is it allow you to add new disk at any time, the CON side is you don't have increased performance benefit as RAID 0) driver will allow you work on virtual disk files, which enables you to utilize the empty space this way.
I have not researched on whether such product exists, just putting the possibility I can think of here.
EDIT: Seems some 3rd party partitioning software can do this, probably by moving the partition forward and then append the space in. But like what is said on the thread, it can fail so you'll always want to backup before such move.