windows 10 - How do I know that a drive that is not labelled 'recovery' is actually the recovery drive?

I have a Blade Pro (2017). It currently has the following disks:

• C - 226 GB SSD


• D - 1.8 TB HDD


• E - 499 MB HDD ("local disk")

The "Local Disk (E:)" is a bit of a mystery to me: it appears empty even when the "show hidden files, folders and drives" option is selected. Frankly I wouldn't have noticed it except it's nearly full and Windows is freaking out that it's running out of disk space, which is obnoxious.

I did some Googling and found this Microsoft question/answer which indicates that it was a glitch with the May 2018 windows update: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/mystery-local-disk-e-appears-after-features-update/9bd9334a-08aa-4fc5-933b-3a396eb042d9. The solution for that bug is:

1. Open the diskpart utility


2. list volume to see all volumes


3. select volume E (or otherwise problematic volume)


4. remove letter=E (or otherwise problematic volume)

Simple enough. But when I ran the diskpart utility and issued the list volume command, I saw there was already an explicitly labelled "Recovery" volume.

How do I know that this drive, E, is actually the recovery drive as indicated in the known issue with the 1803 update of Windows 10?

Answer

How do I know that this drive, E, is actually the recovery drive as indicated in the known issue with the 1803 update of Windows 10?

The only possible thing the partition could contain is the WinRE image due to the fact it's the only default partition that is by default 500 MB.

Source: Recovery tools partition

Simple enough. But when I ran the diskpart utility and issued the list volume command, I saw there was already an explicitly labeled "Recovery" volume.

It is worth pointing out that partition labels are optional. The partition labeled "Recovery" was created by your OEM, and is not required for your system to function, you could change the labels to anything you want within the limits of a partition label.

The system reserved partition is only 16 MB, and the EFI partition is only 300 MB, so the only partition the 500 MB partition can be is the partition that contains the WinRE image.

You can safely disassociate a drive letter from this partition. You could also just disable the notification that is warning you about the low disk space. The partition was never meant to be mounted, so the reason you cannot see files is simply that you don't have read permissions to any files. If you want WinRE to function, when you need it, the permissions should not be changed.

In order to determine if the partition type is properly set to de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac do the following:

1. Open a PowerShell command prompt as an Administrator


2. Type diskpart


3. Within Diskpart type list volume


4. Within Diskpart type select volume 2


5. Issue the detail partition command

You will get the following output:

Which confirms that the partition should have both GPT_ATTRIBUTE_PLATFORM_REQUIRED and GPT_BASIC_DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NO_DRIVE_LETTER set which give you an attribute value of 0x8000000000000001. During the installation of 1803, the attribute GPT_BASIC_DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NO_DRIVE_LETTER lost, so a drive letter was assigned during the upgrade process.

So after you unassigned the drive letter, you should assign the correct attributes for the partition in question, within diskpart issue the following command.

gpt attributes=0x8000000000000001

Source: _PARTITION_INFORMATION_GPT structure