Partition Issue

Leave well alone they are all needed and they are small anyway so not worth the risk messing

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?

Technically, they're all needed.

You can merge the System partition with the C:\ drive, but that's about it.

Hello @gbu,

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?

Depending on whether you are using Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT, certain partitions are created automatically during the installation process. If they are NOT causing problems, then I would leave them alone. Here is a link that explains this in more detail . . .

> Standard Windows 10 Partitions for MBR/GPT Disks

I hope this helps.

Hi @Paul Black
Normally the EFI System Partition is FAT32 formatted. In Op's case I noticed it is NTFS. Any opinions on it?

Ghot said:

Technically, they're all needed.

You can merge the System partition with the C:\ drive, but that's about it.

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).

cereberus said:

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).

Aaron_Sum - Microsoft Agent | Moderator . . .

> WHY MSR PARTITION IS CREATED WHILE INSTALLING WINDOWS 10

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).

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

cereberus said:

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).

Actually, it's more that it's reserved for some previous legacy uses....

Formerly, on disks formatted using the master boot record (MBR) partition layout, certain software components used hidden sectors of the disk for data storage purposes. For example, the Logical Disk Manager (LDM), on dynamic disks, stores metadata in a 1 MB area at the end of the disk which is not allocated to any partition.

The UEFI specification does not allow hidden sectors on GPT-formatted disks. Microsoft reserves a chunk of disk space using this MSR partition type, to provide an alternative data storage space for such software components which previously may have used hidden sectors on MBR formatted disks.

Microsoft Reserved Partition - Wikipedia

A really basic argument for leaving them alone is for compatibility when upgrading. You don't want your upgrade to fail 'cos you fiddled. Plus if you delete, say, the Recovery partition it will normally be recreated when upgrading.