The Recovery partition you are looking at contains the Windows Recovery Tools image, which is what you boot to when you enter the Recovery Environment.

Am I right in assuming that the 'copy recovery partition.' section is perhaps for OEM's additional recovery partitions and that the 300mb Windows 8.1 created one is not used by the recovery copy option? What is going on, Im confused! I have reinstalled Windows 8.1 several times from a freshly formatted drive and getting the same formatting, so I guess whatever it is its part of a standard Windows 8.1 install and nothing Im doing wrong? Can anyone shed any light? From what I can tell, from the little info I can pull from the web, people have a similar Recovery partition created when upgrading from 8.0 to 8.1 and that they also are unable to select the 'Copy the recovery partition.' tick box and some people report the same optimize disk issue. I assumed it would recognize the 300mb Windows created Recovery Partition and copy this over? If not, then what is it there for? Now I tried to research these various issues and information is sparse, other than people with the same, similar issue, although mostly its people upgrading from 8.0 rather than installing a clean full copy of 8.1. I also notice that when I create a recovery disk, I am unable to click on 'Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive'. The Recovery Partition is showing Needs Optimization, but when I click on it to be optimized, it runs quickly (if at all) and tells me it still needs optimizing. (I understand there is a 4th only visible with Diskpart and that is fine) OK so far.now I notice that the Recovery Partition is visible in Disk Optimize and like the other partitions is all stored on my SSD boot up drive.

So upon a clean install, three visible partitions are created, Recovery (300mb), EFI (100mb), and the regular Windows partition.

Just switched out from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit Full Edition and I have to say I am a little confused about Windows 8.1 Recovery.

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