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I had an issue that I was unable to (re-)enable bitlocker encryption(*). Digging deeper I found that the reason for that was, that my recovery environment was disabled (why and at what occasion that had happened beats me - I can only guess it happend by the 1803 upgrade) and BitLocker refuses to engage if there is no RE enabled.

As a side-effect of this digging and re-enabling of the RE I discovered that I have TWO recovery partitions as shown by diskpart:

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    System             260 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Reserved           128 MB   261 MB
  Partition 3    Primary            951 GB   390 MB
  Partition 4    Recovery           450 MB   951 GB
  Partition 5    Recovery          1940 MB   951 GB

After I re-enabled the RE I am now getting this status from REAGENTC:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

    Windows RE status:         Enabled
    Windows RE location:       \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\Recovery\WindowsRE
    Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 150ee949-5188-11e8-94db-852494fe2083
    Recovery image location:
    Recovery image index:      0
    Custom image location:
    Custom image index:        0

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

Since partition 3 (according to diskpart) is the Windows C drive I assume that the counting here is inconsistent: diskpart numbers partitions starting with 1, reagentc apparently with 0, which would indicate that partition 3 is the 4th partition (i.e. the first one labeled "Recovery"). That would imply that the 5th partition (the second one labeled "Recovery") is obsolete and could be deleted.

Could anyone with deeper knowledge on Windows' partition handling confirm that? Or how could one verify that assumption?

Since I hate having duplicate, ambigious and in the worst case harmfully outdated stuff around I would then recycle that 5th partition for other purposes (e.g. keeping copies of important documents or such).

(*) I had prior disabled BitLocker to be able to do a 1:1 disk copy for backup reasons and the disk-image program was unable to copy bitlocker-encrypted disks. So I disabled BitLocker, the intention being to simply re-enable it after the backup. This turned out to be more hassle than expected...

mmo
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  • Have you seen [this question where the poster is asking about multiple recovery partitions](https://superuser.com/q/719216/167207)? – Giacomo1968 Jun 16 '18 at 16:05
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    Yes, I googled a bit on that and saw, that people report having two or more (up to five or even more) Recovery partitions. But I found no conclusive answer or "recipe" on how identify the latest or relevant one. Of course that assumes that the RE isn't spread over multiple partitions and ALL are relevant and required, but I doubt that. – mmo Jun 16 '18 at 19:15

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