How do I know that a drive that is not labelled 'recovery' is actually the recovery drive?

How do I know that this drive, E, is actually the recovery drive as indicated in the known issue with the 1803 update of Windows 10?

The only possible thing the partition could contain is the WinRE image due to the fact it's the only default partition that is by default 500 MB.

Source: Recovery tools partition

Simple enough. But when I ran the diskpart utility and issued the list volume command, I saw there was already an explicitly labeled "Recovery" volume.

It is worth pointing out that partition labels are optional. The partition labeled "Recovery" was created by your OEM, and is not required for your system to function, you could change the labels to anything you want within the limits of a partition label.

The system reserved partition is only 16 MB, and the EFI partition is only 300 MB, so the only partition the 500 MB partition can be is the partition that contains the WinRE image.

You can safely disassociate a drive letter from this partition. You could also just disable the notification that is warning you about the low disk space. The partition was never meant to be mounted, so the reason you cannot see files is simply that you don't have read permissions to any files. If you want WinRE to function, when you need it, the permissions should not be changed.

In order to determine if the partition type is properly set to de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac do the following:

1. Open a PowerShell command prompt as an Administrator
2. Type diskpart
3. Within Diskpart type list volume
4. Within Diskpart type select volume 2
5. Issue the detail partition command

You will get the following output:

Which confirms that the partition should have both GPT_ATTRIBUTE_PLATFORM_REQUIRED and GPT_BASIC_DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NO_DRIVE_LETTER set which give you an attribute value of 0x8000000000000001. During the installation of 1803, the attribute GPT_BASIC_DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NO_DRIVE_LETTER lost, so a drive letter was assigned during the upgrade process.

So after you unassigned the drive letter, you should assign the correct attributes for the partition in question, within diskpart issue the following command.

gpt attributes=0x8000000000000001

Source: _PARTITION_INFORMATION_GPT structure

“Recovery” is the volume label, which could be anything and appears to have been created by something other than windows. Most likely by your OEM.

The 500MB partition in question is typically the Windows Recovery Environment partition and you can remove the drive letter from it.

There won’t be any problem in this situation to remove the E: drive letter assignment.