I want to delete the "active" Recovery Partition on my Dell laptop and expand the OS Partition to reclaim the space.

[PapaHomey]

I have a Dell XPS 15 Laptop, into which I have placed a Samsung EVO 840 1TB SSD. I used the recovery partition at that time to bring the SSD on line, but now I use Acronis True Image 2015 to make images of my laptop drive onto a USB3 3TB HHD.

I've tried just deleting the drive and expanding my OS partition, but I have two problems that come up. First, the "recovery" partition is the first partition on the SSD and windows drive manager won't expand in that direction. It will take up free space at the end of the drive, but not at the beginning. Second, when booting I get an error message saying that a file is missing, or that there is no OS available.

I'm assuming that the MBR is on the "Active" partition, which is the "recovery" partition.

My biggest problem is that I don't have a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit to install from scratch, or I'd do that.

Is there any way I can reclaim the active recovery partition space for my SSD?

 

[spooky2th]

You download the free Partition Wizard which will most likely do the trick.

EDIT:
I would make the correct boot partition active and see if that works.

 

[PapaHomey]

I will look for and download Partition Wizard, that may fix the problem with extending into the partition at the beginning of the disk. However, I already tried making the OS Partition active and that still gave me trouble by saying there was a missing boot file, or there was no OS found.

 

[spooky2th]

Was there another drive on the laptop? Boot into windows recovery if you can and hopefully windows will correct the problem.

 

[PapaHomey]

The laptop only has one drive, the ssd I installed. I have an external hhd for backups and images of the ssd. If I delete the recovery partition and reclaim it's space, I won't be able to boot into windows recovery, because it will have been deleted.

Somehow I have to move the MBR and edit it so that I can make the OS partition the active partition, before I delete the recovery partition. At least that's what I'm guessing needs to be done. But I don't know how to go about moving and changing the MBR so that it sees the OS partition as the only one needed.

 

[spooky2th]

Try a "clone" of the C drive to the SSD. Install the drives like they were originally. Remove any other drives except for the SSD to be cloned. Acronis True Image should be able to clone good. Just an image of the drive will not work.

 

[crazycrads]

This happend to me i used gparted on a live cd running ubuntu, where i made a new partition for some reason it treated that as the boot partion so i loaded the live cd and flaged the os as boot partition. If you are stuck its worth making a live cd with gparted its super simple and easy gui. And to expand any unallocated space to c drive you cant be booted into os . Hope it help

 

[The Original Ralph]

i tried that on my samsung ssd, and it worked fine for the first 3 or 4 days, then it wouldn't boot - luckily i had made a clone of the boot drive onto another SSD and simply cloned back

fwiw

 

[ArtPog]

PapaHomey:
When all is said & done aren't we talking about a rather trifling amount of disk space utilized by the System Recovery partition?

While there is a fair amount of info on the net about how one can integrate the SR partition into the C:\ partition, from our experience we've never found any of these "processes" workable (at least in cases where the OS has already been established. Presumably, there's a more straightforward & workable process at the time the OS is being installed.)

Since you're wise enough to maintain comprehensive backups of your system through disk-imaging, might not you consider to leave well-enough alone?