OEM and Recovery partitions, Is it OK to delete ?
Kirk Bentson would like to recover the space used by his PC’s hidden OEM and Recovery partitions.
“I’m a long-time paid subscriber with a question for Fred Langa. I have a Win7 Dell XPS with a 1TB hard drive that’s been factory-configured with four partitions. They are:
1) OEM partition (hidden) – 39 MB
2) Recovery partition (hidden) – 8.93 GB
3) C: – 466.45 GB
4) D: – 456.1 GB
“I removed the hidden partitions and combined the reclaimed disk space into the C: partition. However, after that, the computer wouldn’t boot.
“I used a recovery disc to roll it back, so now everything works. But I’m still stuck with 2 partitions I don’t want. I’m sure there is a way to get rid of them, but I’m not sure what it is. My hope is that Fred can offer some advice.”
I’m happy to help, but it might not be the advice you want to hear.
Removing the OEM and Recovery partitions used to be a good way to free up disk space — a technique I wrote about way back in 2005.
I’d bought a new notebook, and it arrived with hidden OEM partitions that occupied a full one-third of the total available disk space! (Back then, that wasn’t unusual.) I backed up the OEM partitions and then deleted them from the hard drive.
Back then, it worked because OEM and recovery partitions were mostly static repositories holding archival copies of system files.
But things are different today. Now, OEM/EFI/Recovery and other hidden partitions might be part of the active boot process. Removing the partitions can cause trouble — as it did for Kirk.
Avoiding severe boot trouble is sufficient reason to leave OEM partitions alone. But here’s another good reason: the space you regain on today’s drives is trivial.
With a combined size of just under 9GB, Kirk’s OEM and recovery partitions are fairly average. With a 1TB drive (1,000 GB), removing those partitions would gain him an infinitesimal nine one-thousandths (0.009) more space on the drive.
I have to ask: Why bother?
To my mind, the cost in time, effort, and possible complications far outweighs any possible value gained from recovering a tiny amount of space. Some tasks just aren’t worth doing.
Kirk, my sincere advice to you — and everyone else — is to leave the OEM, recovery, and similar partitions as they are.
Here’s some related reading:
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