Hmm. I've never updated a VM, I always install from scratch. I
have updated my tablet from Win8.1 to Win10, and then to Win10-AE, so I knew that Win10 created a backup of the old system, but I assumed it was to folders in the new filesystem.
Looking at where the recovery partition is, i.e. at the beginning of the drive rather than the end, I wonder if they don't just box up the old filesystem and create a new one further along the drive. ISTR there's a scanning step where they estimate how big the backup area needs to be.
Belay that. I was looking at the order the partitions were listed. I didn't notice that the graphic said something else.
If you want to be rid of the recovery partition I wouldn't do it with a partition manager, I'd use the Disk Cleanup tool in Windows itself.
socratis wrote:PS. BTW, that is CloneVDI looking at itself! I pointed it to the read-only share that I have where the VM resides and it's reading it's own VDI. Kinda cool. I'll hit compact to see what happens

There have been past reports in this topic of problems when CloneVDI is doing I/O to a GA shared folder to an OS X host, perhaps it has to do with the file size. The VDI ended up filled with NULs as I recall. The last such report was a long time ago, but I don't know if it was ever bottomed out.
I'm not sure what you mean about increasing the size being a pain. Do you mean with some tool other than CloneVDI? Obviously when CloneVDI enlarges the disk it makes no difference what partitions are on it - but CloneVDI won't understand non-MBR partition systems. When enlarging the fileystem it only inspects the largest one. The others are ignored except to move them aside if they are "to the right" of the partition I want to enlarge. This is easy for CloneVDI because I don't physically have to move any partitions, I just copy them to a different location when making the clone. GParted has to physically move the rightmost partition as a separate operation, though that should be doable.