Unable to expand disk due to Windows Recovery partition

[penfold]

My dad has an SSD which was running out of room. He was able to install a bigger SSD and cloned the drive over and apparently all is well. Unfortunately this also cloned the recovery partition which is preventing him from expanding the disk to it's full capacity. Normally I would do this for him, but as I am no longer living anywhere near him he has done it. Problem is now, that how can I enable it so he is able to expand the drive and use his full disk? From what I understand this can't be done easily in Windows. In the past (very long time ago) I have used something like partition magic to move partitions around which was pretty straight forward. My issue is the solution needs to be idiot proof so my dad can follow it without causing any problems - or at least run it again without any issues.

 

Any suggestions please?

[Oaktech]

I usually just sack off the recovery partition using diskpart.

[Koldov]

Could you remote in and do it for him?

[penfold]

Could you remote in and do it for him?

This is what I will probably end up doing. But I'm actually going away for a few days so I can't do it right now. As this is a cloned drive, I was hoping he could at least try and remove the partition himself, if anything goes wrong I know he can clone the old drive again. While if I had any issues, I would just re-install from scratch, I'm not sure if having the recovery partition would be useful for my dad. Does it offer anything over the recovery USB?

[Koldov]

If it was an 'original' drive it may well have the original image in the recovery partition with specific drivers and software provided by the manufacturer, or it could just be the Win RE partition.

 

It horses for courses I'm afraid, it seems a little less common these days, but sometimes it can do more harm than good - especially when an elderly relative or less IT literate family member chooses 'restore my computer' or something from a troubleshooting menu and wipes all their data and photos...

 

If he has the original drive and has mastered the cloning process (depending on the software he used), he may be able to do the clone again and choose which partitions to clone on to the new drive?

 

This has some good info:

 

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