The trend we all seem to follow these days, especially those of us who like to build and configure our own rigs, is multiple HDDs. You know, one for boot, pref SDD and 1 or more for storage or RAID purposes. Now, what some of you may not know or haven't come across yet, is an annoying little "foible" that Microsoft slipped in to Win 7. a system reserved partition on a hard drive. it's only 100mb and in the days of TB hard drives, it's a drop in the ocean. Problem is, you cant do anything with that partition at all, you cant extend, shrink, format or delete it. and if like me you are obsessed with having a nice clean set of partition tables, it sticks out like a sore thumb. You can get rid of this by use of a third party disk management program like partition magic or home director etc. this is the thing, DONT!!!!! leave it, ignore it, walk away. What this partition actually contains is Win 7's BOOT MGR and associated files to boot up with or repair a borked boot attempt. You delete this volume or partition and you will wipe all those files and then nothing on this Earth will persuade your computer to boot up again without doing a brand new, shiny install of Windows. (as i discovered ) According to Microsoft, it has been designed to defile a different Hard Drive incase of failure of the Boot Drive. if you only have 1 drive in your rig though it will install these on the boot drive and hide it. So to avoid despoiling your nice clean HDD that you wanted to raid on, only plug in your boot drive at install or format and partition your extra drives BEFORE, installing Win 7.
So very true. It's been around for a long time and generally hidden from the public. With good reason. Unfortunately you learnt the hard way what it is.
Old news....and it's not part of NTFS, it holds the recovery info and some boot files. If you format/partition the disk before installing Windows it won't create the annoying 100MB system partition and those same files will be placed on the boot drive. Edit- nvm I see you said that already...
