Branded computers/laptops that come with Windows pre-installed usually have a hidden hardware manufacturer OEM recovery partition. This partition usually contains a manufacturer’s Windows reference image, which can be used to restore the system to factory settings (rollback/refresh), as well as several manufacturer’s system and diagnostic tools. The size of such an OEM recovery partition can be in the tens of GB. To free up more space on the drive, advanced Windows users can delete this partition.
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How to safely remove OEM partition on Windows using Diskpart?
Open the Disk Management console (diskmgmt.msc, In our example, the drive contains a 15GB recovery partition with the volume label recovery and type healthy oem partition, If you right-click the OEM recovery partition in Disk Management, you’ll see that there is no menu item (and no option to delete the partition).
In our example, the disk has an additional recovery partition containing WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment). winre.wim The image on this partition allows you to boot Windows in recovery mode.
Check which partition contains the Windows Recovery Environment image. Run command:
reagentc /info
In our example, this is the division 4 on the drive 0, (\\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\ Division4\Recovery\WindowsRE).
Use the built-in PowerShell Disk Management module to list the partitions on the system drive:
Get-Disk | Where-Object IsSystem -eq $True|Get-Partition
In this instance, you do not need to move the recovery WIM image as it is on a separate smaller 500MB recovery partition.
If the winre.wim image is on an OEM partition, we recommend that you move WinRE to the OS (Windows) partition.
Now list the Windows bootloader configuration:
bcdedit
Make sure that there is no reference to your OEM partition in the configuration of Windows Boot Manager and Windows Bootloader.
Microsoft intentionally restricted the functionality of the Disk Management graphical snap-in to work with system, protected, hidden, and OEM recovery partitions. To manage such partitions, you must use third-party tools or built-in diskpart Permission. In this example, we will show you how to remove the manufacturer’s OEM recovery partition from the drive diskpart,
Open Command Prompt as administrator, and then run the following command:
diskpart
List the hard drives on the computer:
DISKPART> list diskDisk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 59 GB 5120 KB
tip, If you don’t see the disk you need, scan the storage device again rescan Permission.
Select the disk that contains the OEM partition:
DISKPART> select disk 0
Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
tip, You must specify the correct disk number here. On a computer with a single HDD/SSD, you usually need to select the drive with the index 0,
List of partitions on the selected disk:
DISKPART> list partition
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Recovery 400 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 System (EFI) 260 MB 401 MB
Partition 3 Reserved 128 MB 661 MB
Partition 4 Primary 43 GB 789 MB
Partition 5 Recovery 495 MB 43 GB
Partition 6 Primary 15 GB 44 GB
Then select the partition you want to delete:
DISKPART> select partition 6
Partition 6 is now the selected partition.
tip, Enter the number of the partition you want to delete. You must be careful while selecting the partition to avoid accidentally deleting the data or system partition.
Try deleting the partition:
DISKPART> delete partition
The following error appears:
Virtual Disk Service error: Cannot delete a protected partition without the force protection parameter set.
Diskpart cannot delete this partition. List detailed information about the selected partition and its attributes:
DISKPART> detail partition
Partition 6
Type : 27
Hidden: Yes
Active: Yes
As you can see, the partition type is 27, while a typical Windows NTFS partition with a standard MBR partition table uses type 07 (a hidden partition has code 17).
You can try changing the partition type as follows:
DISKPART>setid id=07
However, the easiest way to quickly delete a partition is to use the special defy flag. It allows you to delete any type of partition:
DISKPART> delete partition override
DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition.
tip, You won’t be able to delete a system or boot partition, or any other partition containing an active swap file or memory crash dump.
Now you can close the diskpart session using the command:
exit
In this way, any OEM partition can be removed. After deleting a partition, you can use the free Unallocated space to expand other partitions or create a new partition with the Disk Management snap-in.
Remove Drive Letter for OEM Recovery Partition on Windows
a separate additional recovery partition (HHealthy, OEM Partition) may appear on the disk with an assigned drive letter when upgrading to a Windows 10 build. Only recovery And System Volume Information The folders are on the new OEM partition.
However, there is insufficient free space in this volume, less than 9%. As a result, Windows 10 will start showing frequent Storage Sense notifications that this disk is full and needs to be cleaned up.
Run command:
reagentc /info
It is not recommended to delete this partition if it contains a WinRE environment image. You can move the WinRE image from partition and delete it if the partition is large and you want to delete it to free up space. If smaller, you can easily remove the drive letter from the partition using diskpart:
diskpart
list volume
select volume <volume_number>
remove letter=<drive_letter>
exit
It is even easier to remove a mount point using the command:mountvol E: /D
It hides the recovery partition from the user.
Or you can move WinRE image to C drive:reagentc /disable
reagentc /setreimage /path C:\Windows\System32\Recovery
reagentc /enable
This will move your WInRE image to the C:\Recovery folder, and the hidden partition can be deleted.
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