How to recreate a recovery partition in windows 10

[Manwithquestion]

I recently bought a 1TB SSD to replace my old 500GB HDD as the boot drive. Initially I used Acronis True Image to clone my old drive onto my new one but kept the old one hooked up, hoping to format it and use it as storage. When I first booted it back up I noticed it booted from the old drive (HDD). Before I restarted to adjust the boot order in the BIOS, I removed the cloned recovery partition of my new drive because I wanted most of the space it was using (almost 500GB) on the main partition. Since the new drive had more space than the old one, the Acronis software wouldn't let me add any more space to the SSD's main partition than what the original drive had (about 465GB), instead adding all the extra space to the recovery drive.

As some of you will have guessed, the new drive would not boot properly when placed in priority order in the BIOS and I was pretty confused for a while until enough online research brought me to re-clone the drive WITHOUT removing any partitions as well as disconnect the old drive as soon as that finished. It now boots properly with all my old files in place, but I have two questions that remain:

First and most important, how do I safely reconfigure my recovery drive so it doesn't take up so much room but allows me to boot from the disk? I'm weary of touching it now since I don't want to have to re-clone a third time, but I'd like to reallocate most of the 450+ GB it's taking up back onto the main usable partition.

Second, will re-attaching my old drive cause any conflicts with boot order? I want to plug it back in and reformat it to use as storage but since it's fully boot-able at the moment I'm worried it might throw the computer back into the issue of not booting from the right hard drive, even though setting the boot order in the BIOS to prioritize the SSD would seem to be the obvious answer. That might just be me convinced computers are part science part voodoo magic.

 

[ArtPog]

Ordinarily the Recovery Partition will utilize 450 MB - 500 MB of disk-space, a rather miniscule amount of disk-space in the scheme of things. Note these are MEGABYTES, not GIGABYTES. Are you certain the RP was about 500 GIGABYTES and not megabytes?

If, by chance, the RP is 500 GB or so, it would be helpful if you would send a screenshot of Disk Management.

 

[Manwithquestion]

It was indeed 500 Gigabytes - half the size of my 1TB SSD - which is why I got frustrated with it. However I managed to figure out the solution. I deleted the 500GB recovery partition altogether using the diskpart function in cmd, added all but 450 MB of the newly unallocated space back to c:, created a new partition out of the remaining 450 MB, then used EasyUS Todo Backup to clone the recovery partition from my old hard drive onto the 450 MB partition I just made. Restarted it to check and it boots up just fine, and now I've reformatted my old disk to use as storage.

 

[ArtPog]

You did well. Apparently it was a glitch in the disk-cloning program. I'm aware of it happening.
BTW, with the (sometimes) exceptions involving OEM machines, we routinely delete the RP from our systems, finding no need for it. Of course, we comprehensively backup our systems on a routine/frequent basis.

 

[0ldsch00l]

My personal method on main rig is not windows based, yes I run windows 24/7 but Linux is my work horse. pop in Lin with clonzezilla disk or a lone bootable clonezilla, best thing since norton ghost and better. I dont like how system is, I reboot hit F11 boot cd and in 6 min have main SSD reimaged from image on storage drive. Reboot from SSD and back to windows. IMHO its safer and the cloning is perfect compaed to any windows software for images

 

[Manwithquestion]

Yeah I must say I was pretty confused on why Acronis wouldn't let me expand the main partition on my SSD beyond about 465GB even when I had another 465GB or so unallocated after shrinking the RP. Thinking about it now I could have just turned the second 465GB into a different partition altogether and simply deleted+reallocated that space onto the first main partition, but at the time I didn't know how these things worked (I've learned a lot in the last 48 hours).

I had read that RP's were often deleted, which added to my confusion as to why my new drive wouldn't boot when the only thing I did was delete that partition. I'm fine keeping it for now though, 450MB out of 1TB isn't too bad.

 

[0ldsch00l]

Acronis costs monies dont like and I doubt it can do what Clonzezilla can, has heavy compression options, think I crammed 50 GB image into 10 gb finally with max compression method on Clonezilla

 

[Manwithquestion]

Well in this case the software that came with my SSD provided a free version of Acronis True Image. Might have been useful to see what other programs could have done I suppose.

 

[0ldsch00l]

Check out clonzezilla its open source free, no harm in burning it to a DVD RW and testing it out

 

[ArtPog]

Yeah I must say I was pretty confused on why Acronis wouldn't let me expand the main partition on my SSD beyond about 465GB even when I had another 465GB or so unallocated after shrinking the RP. Thinking about it now I could have just turned the second 465GB into a different partition altogether and simply deleted+reallocated that space onto the first main partition, but at the time I didn't know how these things worked (I've learned a lot in the last 48 hours).

I had read that RP's were often deleted, which added to my confusion as to why my new drive wouldn't boot when the only thing I did was delete that partition. I'm fine keeping it for now though, 450MB out of 1TB isn't too bad.

We run exclusively-based Windows systems and our disk-cloning program of choice is Casper. Rarely do we employ its disk-imaging capabilities except at times when generational copies of a system is of importance.

Our chief use of this d-c program is routinely employing it as a comprehensive backup program to maintain updates on our systems rarely less than weekly and more often a few times per week or even daily. The program carries out its d-c operations faster than any program I've ever used. In most cases it takes well under four minutes to clone the contents of one drive to another drive - frequently less than a minute! (Obviously the volume of data plays a role here.)

We've been using this Casper program for about 15 years or so. I've never found a d-c program its equal let alone its superior. It's super easy to use with a simple user interface and carries out its d-c operation in a no-nonense fashion. An added feature as compared with other d-c programs is that usually (but not always) the recipient of the clone (containing an OS of course) connected as a USB external drive will boot as a USB device.

So why doesn't every PC use Casper? Because it's a commercial program costing $49.99. And most users are loathe to purchase a type of program they can obtain freely on the net.

Anyway...if you're interested you may want to download/install a trial version of the program. It's slightly crippled as compared with the commercial program but will give you a good idea of its capabilities when the program is used routinely/frequently; understanding that the INITIAL d-c operation involving the source-destination drives will generally take significantly more time than following d-c operations with these drives.

See...https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/trial/