OEM Recovery Partitions on system drive?

[Netherspark]

After reinstalling windows two partitions labeled "Recovery (OEM Partition)" have appeared on my system drive. They're eating half a gigabyte each and I have no idea what they're for or how to delete them (all options in Disk Management are greyed out).

What can I do about these partitions? I'd much rather delete them and merge the space they're wasting into back into C drive.

[c0rnel]

You wanna keep those as they are the OEM recovery partitions that came preinstalled with your system. You'll need them when you need to do a factory reset.

[Netherspark]

You wanna keep those as they are the OEM recovery partitions that came preinstalled with your system. You'll need them when you need to do a factory reset.

This is a self-built PC, nothing was pre-installed. I just installed Windows on a brand new drive and they appeared out of nowhere.

[Schmeebs]

This is a self-built PC, nothing was pre-installed. I just reinstalled Windows on a brand new drive and they appeared out of nowhere.

they are there FOR oems, they just have no data on them because you are the oem.

[Almiria]

You bought an OEM windows licence which is cheaper than the regular one, regular one can be transfered while OEM can't.
You can't transfer an OEM licence / key to another PC, and you will likely lose your licence if you try to reinstall windows with another method, that's why you have to keep this partition in case you need to reinstall windows.

[Netherspark]

You bought an OEM windows licence which is cheaper than the regular one, regular one can be transfered while OEM can't.
You can't transfer an OEM licence / key to another PC, and you will likely lose your licence if you try to reinstall windows with another method, that's why you have to keep this partition in case you need to reinstall windows.

My Windows license came from a free Windows 7 upgrade, then transferred to my new system when I bought a new motherboard a couple of months ago.

These partitions were not present on my previous installation, they only appeared on my fresh install last week.

[Deleted]

Windows creates a recovery partition to allow booting and repairing a damaged windows installation.

You can delete it with command line tools (see https://www.partitionwizard.com/part...partition.html) in which case you might want to create a recovery disk first should you ever need to recover a damaged system.

Then there's a thing called EFI system partition that is required to boot Windows and thus you should not remove it unless you're also removing Windows.