Partition Issue

cereberus said:

Actually only the main C drive and EFI partition are essential. You do not need the recovery partition per se. as you can use an installation disk to do the same thing.

More bizarre is the 16 MB MSR partition as nobody has ever fpund a use for it. It is reserved for some future use but nobody knows what and deleting it has no impact (except maybe preventing some unknown future use).

Ghot said:

You're preaching to the choir. My setup...

Attachment 324691

@Ghot,
Your drive is MBR. There it is impossible to even have a MSR or EFI system partition on it.

The System Reserved partition created by Windows setup on an MBR disk is entirely different than the Microsoft System Reserved partition created on a GPT disk.

Ghot said:

All my storage drives are GPT. But my OS drive, doesn't even need the 3 partitions it has now.

Since your a master of MR backups ......... Convert MBR Disk to GPT Disk in Windows 10 schnell .

gbu said:

I recently installed a new M.2 drive that ive installed the OS onto, what ive since noticed via minitool partition wizard is that there is 3 other partitions along with the C Drive, are they all needed or can i merge hem into 1 drive?

If you view the partitions with disk management you will see only 3 partitions.
The 16 MB reserved partition is hidden when viewing with disk management.

For GPT drives end users can have 128 partitions.

There are no real benefits in reducing the number of partitions.

End users move from MBR drives to GPT drives for the greater flexibility with partitions.

There are times where you can benefit from using safe mode.

If you delete the recovery partition you will lose safe mode and gain < 1 GB free space.

On a 1 TB this is approximately 0.1 % free space benefit which is negligible.

Some partitions can be merged but there is no real benefit.