Partition Woes - Recovery and Extend, third party?

[Warwick_Tech]

Hi All,

 

So I decided to give my VM's some more space to work with, but although extending the drives worked for the newer one, older units that had two or more recovery partitions won't extend because they cannot access the block of data behind the Recovery Partition -

 

I've been recomended third party apps like AOMEI, but the free version has now server support (apparently)

 

Can anyone share some insight?

 

 

Also noticed my two virtual hosts have no recovery partitions at all (?!)

 

 

EDIT:

This is looking promising

Extend Volume Blocked by a Recovery Partition on Windows 10 | Windows OS Hub

Edited July 12, 2021 by Warwick_Tech

[3s-gtech]

How brave are you feeling? You can sometimes just nuke the recovery partition clear out of the way (yup, done that myself). Snapshot first!

[Warwick_Tech]

How brave are you feeling? You can sometimes just nuke the recovery partition clear out of the way (yup, done that myself). Snapshot first!

 

Well, it seems to be ok -

 

Though that article is in need of some translation and error correction -

 

Basically it turns out they were using the newer recovery partition, as I assigned two drive letters (R and T) and it reported T was the primary recovery partition;

 

Though when I ran reagentc /disable it deleted the .wim file completely (both times) so had to steal it from another server and re-register them

 

the annoying part was I couldn't use the old recovery partition as it was 5mb too small and creating a new one would just drop it at the back, blocking future expansion without going through this whole process again

 

So workaround was to load the recovery partition onto C: directly (not ideal, but it's all on the same physical drive anyway) and make sure it was pointed to C:

 

In conclusion, it's actually interesting to see how all this works and I would encourage doing the first few steps to check your partition tables, though do not run reagentc /disable without due course and attention!