How do I stop Windows from using a partition?

electronuser · 07 Sep 2016

topgundcp said:

No, unless there's a major update then Windows usually creates an extra 450MB Recovery partition, normally after C: Drive.

Windows will have no way to write stuff in this partition since this partition will be hidden by not assigning any drive letter to it, not sure why you think it will.

Not to offend any body but I don't understand the reasoning in post #2

Not sure also ....maybe Poster 2 thought OP could scrape that widows data to another drive or healthy partition with Linux but having done that successfully here only with a visible healthy windows partition and not deleted data on a failing windows drive that wouldn't load windows I'm at same thoughts as your question here but I back up anthing important or that I want to keep anyway .......seen too many HDD /PSU and mainboards fail since DOS and Win 3.0 ,ppffttt.....and that's just at home .

topgundcp · 07 Sep 2016

Unless I misunderstood the original question that OP was concerned about data will be written on this System Reserved partition and that's why the follow up question was raised in post #8.

To clarify a little bit more on MBR disk. Depending on how you install Windows ie. if you previously format the disk then Windows will put the Recovery & BCD together in C: drive without creating the System Reserved Partition. However, with this configuration, you won't be able to use bitlocker feature. System Reserved partition is needed if you are using bitlocker.

Slartybart · 07 Sep 2016

cj1094 said:

I recently had a different version of Windows on the second Partition.

After installing Windows 10 to the last partition, everything on the second partition was deleted.

I want to do this because I need to recover files from the second partition, and stopping Windows from using this partition would reduce the number of files being overwritten.

I could be wrong Dino, but post# 1 sounds like data recovery to me

How everything got deleted on par 2 doesn't really matter - it got deleted and cj1094 seems to want some of the data back so it can be used by the new install.

That's how I read it at least

+edit

Looking at the layout in post# 1, it seems as though cj1094 places a data partition before the system partition. If that held true for the previous install, then the data might have been in what is now unallocated space.

And if that's the case, then Partition Wizard, Partition recovery, might be the best way to recover the data. That's why I asked about it in post# 10

I don't want cj1094 to take any action in post 10 until more information about the data is provided. I believe that's the concern expressed about writing to the partition. If the data was in the 19.53 GB of unallocated space, moving the SR there would overwrite a few hundred MB of data.

-edit

cj1094 · 07 Sep 2016

Hello again everyone, thanks for the replies. I made an image of my drive and dumped it to my external. I'm not too worried about what will happen to the data.

I'll go ahead and mark this as solved.