The Microsoft Surface RT has two variant storage options 32 GB and 64 GB. However, the capacity of free space you can use to store your apps, games, music, photos, videos, and other documents is only 15 GB for the 32 GB version and 45 GB for the 64 GB version.

Most spaces of your storage are taken up by the Operating System files and a recovery partition. You can get an extra 3,200 MB of free disk space by removing the recovery partition on your Surface tablet.

Table of contents

  1. How to check for recovery partition existent
  2. How to remove the recovery partition on your Surface tablet

1How to check for recovery partition existent

You can verify that your Surface device has the recovery partition or not by following the simple steps below:

  1. Right-click on Start Menu (Win + X) and click on Computer Management
  2. Go to Storage > Disk Management
  3. Then you will see the last partition labeled as Healthy (Recovery Partition) with a storage space of 3.13 GB.

2How to remove the recovery partition on your Surface tablet

There are many ways to remove the recovery partition from your Surface tablet. However, there is a proper way to do this by using an existing tool available on Windows called “Create a recovery drive“. You will need a USB flash drive that can hold at least 4GB. This tool will back up your recovery drive to the USB flash drive and let you delete the recovery partition if you want.

To create a recovery drive, first, you need to insert a USB flash drive with a storage size of at least 4GB. Then:

  1. Press Win + S and type create a recovery drive
  2. Click on Create a recovery drive
  3. Make sure you selected Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive
  4. Select the USB flash drive you inserted
  5. Click Create to start creating the recovery drive
  6. It will take around 15 minutes to complete the process of creating the recovery drive.
  7. After the USB flash drive is created, Make sure you click on “Delete the recovery partition” to delete the recovery partition on your Surface tablet.
  8. Click the Delete button to confirm deleting the recovery partition.
  9. It will take a few minutes to complete the process of deleting the recovery partition on your Surface device.
  10. Now you will that, 3,200 MB of disk space has been added to (C:).
  11. Now you can see that there is no more Recovery partition in the Disk Management.

After you created the USB flash drive with recovery files, make sure you keep it safe as you will need it to recover your device later.