Windows 2026 – Work around for recovery drive when needing to expand the c drive.

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The Native Route (Diskpart)

This method involves temporarily disabling the Windows Recovery Environment (which moves its necessary files to the C: drive), deleting the blocking partition, expanding C:, and then re-enabling recovery.

Step 1: Disable the Recovery Environment Disabling it ensures you don’t lose the recovery image; Windows simply moves the winre.wim file to your C: drive.

  1. Right-click the Start button and open Command Prompt (Admin) or PowerShell (Admin).
  2. Type the following command and press Enter to check the status: reagentc /info
  3. Type the following command and press Enter to disable it: reagentc /disable

Step 2: Delete the Recovery Partition using Diskpart Because it’s a protected system partition, Disk Management won’t let you right-click and delete it. You have to use diskpart.

  1. In the same Administrator command window, type: diskpart
  2. List your physical disks: list disk
  3. Select the disk that holds your operating system (usually Disk 0): select disk 0 (Change 0 to your actual disk number if different).
  4. List the partitions on that disk: list partition
  5. Look at the list and identify the Recovery partition by its size (usually around 500MB – 1GB) and type. Select it by its number: select partition X (Replace X with the Recovery partition number. Be extremely careful to select the correct one.)
  6. Delete the partition using the override command (this forces Windows to delete a protected partition): delete partition override
  7. Type exit to leave diskpart.

Step 3: Extend the C: Drive Now that the roadblock is gone, the unallocated space is directly next to your C: drive.

  1. Open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc).
  2. Right-click your C: partition.
  3. Click Extend Volume…
  4. Click through the wizard (it will automatically select all the available 50GB of unallocated space) and hit Finish.

Step 4: Re-enable the Recovery Environment

  1. Go back to your Command Prompt (Admin).
  2. Type the following command and press Enter: reagentc /enable (Note: Windows will now store the recovery environment inside a folder on the C: drive, which works perfectly fine, or it may automatically carve out a new small partition at the very end of the drive if it prefers).
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