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Ran into an interesting one this past weekend. My desktop system originally had Windows 7 x64 Pro installed on SSD along with a 1GB data drive. A second 1GB data drive was added later, the SSD was upgraded in place to a larger model using Clonezilla Live, and finally, the system was upgraded in place to WIndows 10. Per this thread, I still had a 3TB Toshiba lying around that was intended to replace both of those HDDs, and I finally got around to doing it.

That's when I discovered that Windows was somehow using the older HDD as the boot drive. Viewed in Disk Management, the drive structure was as follows:



...where Disk 1, "System Reserved," was the active partition. Using Google and a bit of DiskPart in CLI, I was able to transfer the boot files to (C:), deactivate System Reserved, and activate (C:), and the system then booted normally from (C:). After that I continued with my data transfer from old drives to new.

Now I'm trying to find out what that 100MB System Reserved partition was for, and whether there are long-term consequences for not having it. One website says its a holdover from the Win7 install (but why did Windows insist on putting it on that drive?), whereas the 450MB Recovery partition is the criticial Windows 10 partition; while another says System Reserved is normal and required for using BitLocker encryption (I don't).

Any insight?

The system reserved partition is required for:

1. Bitlocker
2. GPT Bootable disks

Guess I won't worry about it until the next reinstall, then. Still mystified how the HDD was chosen as the system boot disk way back when.

ludi wrote:

Guess I won't worry about it until the next reinstall, then. Still mystified how the HDD was chosen as the system boot disk way back when.

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The physical order/number of the SATA disks does not always correspond to the logical order in which the disks are enumerated.

Meaning physical disk 1 was most likely logically enumerated as disk 0 during install. The boot loader will be put on disk 0 and Windows is free to be installed to any other partition you please.

I've gotten burned by this issue before. As a result, I always -- regardless of OS -- try to make sure the drive I want to use as the system drive is the ONLY drive connected to the system during OS installation.

It's the only way to be sure.

just brew it! wrote:

I've gotten burned by this issue before. As a result, I always -- regardless of OS -- try to make sure the drive I want to use as the system drive is the ONLY drive connected to the system during OS installation.

It's the only way to be sure.

OK, Hicks.

just brew it! wrote:

I've gotten burned by this issue before. As a result, I always -- regardless of OS -- try to make sure the drive I want to use as the system drive is the ONLY drive connected to the system during OS installation.

It's the only way to be sure.

Same, ran into this issue myself, but any Linux distro I've tried has always respected my choice of where the boot/boot-loader should go. I only unplug drives if Windows is involved.