Skip to main content

Hidden partitions visible after restore

Thread needs solution

Hi,

I restored my primary boot disk with windows 10. The restore process reported no errors, windows 10 boots without any problems. But "my computer" shows 4 new drives with assigned drive letters, two of them with size 0, 2 with size 99,2MB not formatted. It seems that Windows displays formerly hidden restore partitions.

Is there a way to hide these partitions and free the used drive letters?

update:
diskmgmt.msc shows my 3 physical hard drives, each of them has a primary partition (driveletters c,d,e) and a hidden system EFI-Systempartition, one with 500mb and 2 with 100mb.

0 Users found this helpful

I have experienced a similar issue with Windows 10 and a restore procedure run from the Windows installed True Image app with multiple HDD's attached to the machine. I have found through testing that this occurs only sporadically and is not something that happens each time a restore is attempted.

Having said that, we MVP's recommend that a restore operation of a system disk be performed from the boot (Recovery) media which you should have or can create from within the installed application using the Recovery Media Creation tool found under the Tools icon in the program GUI. Additionally, I recommend that for those running multiple drives only the source drive (drive where backup files are located) and the target drive (drive desired to become the system disk) should be attached to the machine during the entire operation and that once the restore is complete that Windows 10 be booted without any secondary drives attached to the machine on first boot.

I believe that it is Windows 10 that causes this issue and not True Image. Additionally, in my case once a recovery was completed following the above recommendations I was able to attach secondary drives to the machine and delete the troublesome partitions on the secondary disks without issue using Windows Disk Management. A third party disk or partition management tool could be used to do so as well.