What’s the Difference between Recovery Partition and Partition Recovery?

Although the terms ‘recovery partition’ and ‘partition recovery’ sound somewhat similar, they are two very different things. This article explains both these terms in detail and when they are used. To begin with, let’s cover some details about ‘recovery partition’ and how it’s used.

What Is a Recovery Partition?

A recovery partition is a hidden partition on a hard disk that is used in the event of a disaster. When your Mac/Windows won’t boot, when it’s acting up, and you need to clear the drive or fix it because it’s corrupted or damaged. Whatever the situation, the recovery partition will assist you in repairing the drive or, in severe cases, reinstalling the operating system.

The following conditions must be met for a system to start booting properly:

The Master Boot Record (abbreviated as MBR) exists and is secure.
There is at least one active partition in the Partition Table.

The MBR’s executable code sends the control to an active partition, allowing it to load suitable files (such COMMAND.COM, NTLDR, and so on) dependent on the file system type of the partition. If these files are missing or corrupted, the partition becomes unbootable. You will get a pop-up error message saying “NTLDR is missing“?)

Note: What Are The Consequences Of Deleting Recovery Partitions? The recovery partition is normally established by the PC manufacturer in order to restore the PC to its factory default settings. Few novice users delete the recovery partition to free up disk space without taking any of the essential back-ups of the drive. If you happen to delete the recovery partition it wipes out all of your installed programs and personal data from the drive.

Case 1: How To Access Recovery Partition On Windows

If your computer isn’t running the way it should and keeps sending out error messages, or you just want to make a reset to its default state, then Windows 10 recovery partition plays a rather important role. How to factory reset a Windows 10 laptop? Well, the process of restoring Windows 10 from the recovery partition is rather easy. Just follow these steps:

Go to the settings and in the search bar type Reset.
Now click on Reset this PC, under Recovery option select Get started to reset.
You can select whether to keep your files or discard everything throughout the recovery process. You should make your own decision based on your personal requirements. Then the process of resetting begins.

These steps are used to restore Windows 10 from the recovery partition.

Case 2: How To Access Recovery Partition On Mac

It is a straightforward way to access the recovery partition. To access the recovery partition,

Turn ON your Mac
Press and hold the Command + R keys until you see a Mac OS utility screen. This is called the recovery mode/partition.

Here you will see the following options:

Reinstall Mac OS: This provides an installation of the Mac OS in case of a system crash or a failure. Reinstallation of Mac might result in data loss, in such scenarios it is important to have a backup of your important data. If you forget to take backup of your important then make use of Remo Recover an effective
Restore from Time Machine backup: As the name suggests, this restore feature is used when you want to restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup in the event of a system crash or other disasters. However, this is possible only when you have Time Machine set up beforehand.
Access Disk Utility: The First Aid feature in Disk Utility is a wonderful feature to use when you want to repair damaged/corrupted volumes on your hard disk.

Disk Utility may fix a variety of disk issues, such as numerous apps quitting unexpectedly, a file being corrupted, an external device not working properly, or your computer failing to boot. Disk Utility isn’t capable of detecting or repairing all faults with a disk.

If Disk Utility warns you that your disk is about to fail, make a backup of your data and start repairing the disk.

In the disk utility app click on View > and click on Show all devices
Click the First Aid button after selecting a volume in the sidebar and click on Run
When the process is completed click on the Done button.

In addition to this, there is another distinguishing feature called ‘Internet Recovery’, which is what sets your Mac OS recovery partition apart from other OS’s. Internet Recovery comes in handy when the regular recovery partition isn’t working or is missing.

Now that we’ve seen what a recovery partition is, let us now look at partition recovery in the next section.

What is Partition Recovery?

We normally think of a hard drive as one ‘whole’ disk, but it actually consists of multiple partitions within it. Partition is nothing but creating a number of region on the disk, these regions are termed as partitions. Partitions get lost due to MBR damage or deleted accidentally, recovering lost partition is known as Partition Recovery. We normally think of a hard drive as one ‘whole’ disk, but it actually consists of multiple partitions within it. When a partition is deleted, the system often removes the system’s assignment for that position on the hard drive, allowing that area of memory to be overwritten as needed. However, as long as that region of the disk is unaltered by any addition of new data, you can still use recovery software to restore the partition. Before heading to restore the deleted or lost partition, let us understand the common causes for loss/ deletion of partitions.

Common Causes Behind Lost/Deleted Partition

You might get a pop message saying that the partition is missing. You might be wondering what might be the reasons for the deletion of a partition. Here are a few factors that would result in the deletion of partitions.

These partitions can get deleted due to various reasons such as improper usage of ‘Disk Utility’ tools, Accidental deletion of partitions, file system corruption or bad sectors on the disk, etc. Recovery of deleted, lost or damaged partitions is termed as ‘partition recovery’.

How To Recover a Lost Partition?

You can certainly make use of the cmd command to recover deleted lost partitions. However, using cmd carries the risk of permanently losing data and damaging the hard drive.

Yes, incorrectly entering the above-mentioned commands might result in data loss as well as serious damage to the hard drive and operating system.

Remo Recover is a safe and reliable partition recovery software that can restore deleted partitions and all of their data. The software includes an advanced scan engine that will thoroughly scan your hard drive and recover any partitions that have been lost. This partition recovery software supports file systems like HFS, HFS+, FAT32, FAT16, APFS, exFAT, etc,. This software can recover files in server data loss scenarios like formatting a partition, re-formatting, RAW partition, inaccessible partition. Download the tool to recover deleted or lost partitions.

Download and install Remo Recover a partition recovery software on your Mac or Windows (since it is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems). Launch the software and follow the steps below.

From the Main screen Click on Recover Volumes/Drives.
Click on Volume Recovery option to recover deleted or lost partitions on Mac OSX.

Select the Drive from Which you want to restore volume then click on Next.
Once the process is completed the recovered files will be in File Type View and Data Type.

Click on the Save option to get back the recovered files on the desired location.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Why Use Remo Recover to Recover Lost Partitions?

The advantage of using Remo Recover is that all your partitions are recovered in the exact same form as it was originally, the tool is integrated with read-only mechanism.
The tool can recover data from all kinds of hard drives like SSD, HDD, SCSI, IDE, etc., and all storage devices like SD cards, external hard drives, and USB flash sticks.

2. How to Find and Delete an Old Recovery Partition?

Follow the steps below to find and delete old recovery partition

Type cmd.exe, holding down Shift and Ctrl, and selecting the Command Prompt result.
To check the Recovery partition is active, run the command reagentc /info, it will display status of Recovery Partition.
Open Disk Management on the system.
Locate the partition that the command reagentc /info listed as the Recovery Partition. Now you know all the other Recovery partitions.