Safe to defragment recovery partition?

justinlee · 27 Jul 2011

I would like to know whether it is safe to defragment my recovery partition? Seeing as it is listing in the Disk Defragmenter, which states that only disks which can be defragmented are shown i am assuming that it is.

I recently had to reinstall windows on one of my laptops so checked the disks for fragmentation a fews days later and i noticied that all disks had been defraged apart from C: drive and the recovery partition.

I also have a brand new laptop, which is also running Windows 7 x64 and all disks were defraged apart from C: drive again. Having looked at the schedule the date/time had not come up yet so i am assuming that is why, but why would windows choose to defrag one drive but not another?

Lastly, i notice Windows chooses to schedule a defrag every Wedneday at 01:00 by default so i assume if my laptop is off it will start the defrag process the next time i turn my system on, correct?

whs · 27 Jul 2011

That makes no sense since the content of the recovery partition never changes.

TheReaper · 27 Jul 2011

Hello there.
It is perfectly safe to defrag the recovery partition, but there's no real reason for it.
As for the defrag of all disks apart from C:, it's possibly not marked for defrag in the scheduler. Here's a useful link to help you with the use of windows disk defragmenter: disk defragmenter-open & use.
On another note, there are better (free) disk defragmenters out there, I personally use Defraggler, it's a great little program.

justinlee · 27 Jul 2011

I have gone into the defrag scheduler and the recovery partition is selected by default. I agree, i cannot see the need to ever defrag this partition so why is it selected by default?

justinlee · 27 Jul 2011

Should i also assume that the System Reserved partition should NOT be defragmented either?

**cluberti** · 27 Jul 2011

Usually recovery partitions are hidden, as is the system reserved (100 or 300mb) partition. If you're seeing them, perhaps it's worth investigating that first

. I would agree, however, that defragmenting either of these types of partitions is only looking for trouble at best.