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mavavilj
Asked: 2022-09-29 11:28:26 +0800 CST

Weird small Windows 10 partition on my Ubuntu disc. What is it?

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I installed Windows 10 on a separate disc, while my other (original) disc had Ubuntu 20.04. I don't recall, whether my original Ubuntu disc (shown in picture) already had 3 rather than 2 partitions, but now it shows:

enter image description here

Where the highlighted partition seems to report as "Windows 10" in GRUB.

Is this something added by installing Windows 10 on a second SSD? Or what is it? Can I delete it?

update-grub reports:

sudo update-grub
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-48-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-48-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-46-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-46-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.13.0-52-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.13.0-52-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Windows 10 on /dev/sda1

Contents look like:

enter image description here

I speculate this is related to:

https://askubuntu.com/a/158319/684850

This https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-22-04-alongside-windows-10 suggests that it might be a result from dual booting.

Potential solutions:

Could I clone the Ubuntu on this disc to another disc w/o the Windows partition?

boot

1 Answers

  1. That is the recovery partition created by windows 10 during installation. When you're creating new partition on an MBR disk, Windows will create a system reserved partition, and if it is a GPT disk, then Windows will create a recovery partition and an EFI system partition without a drive letter. The recovery partition on Windows 10 consumes about 450MB which would fit in that 537MB partition you have there. It is safe to delete if you don't care about recovering your Windows installation and want to free up some space.

    This is how to delete the recovery partition in Windows. Use diskpart to remove it as shown in the link. You could also use disks in Ubuntu, which would accomplish the same thing.

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