Is unformated primary partition necessary

NavyLCDR said:

@topgundcp, @BunnyJ, @whs,

Would you care to elaborate what portion of my reply #2 and the link I posted is factually incorrect? The very first thing that I stated was that Microsoft says the precious MSR unformmated partition is necessary on a GPT disk. Was not the appropriate information and warning given right up front?



But @meebers, what are you going to do when Microsoft detects that you deleted their "necessary" partition and send their black helicopters to start circling over your house? :

It's not a matter of being correct or incorrect it's about what to suggest to another user to do to his/her PC.

In this case you can do anything you like to your PC and take all the risks you like to. What I would recommend is when recommending a solution to another user is side on the conservative side and that would mean not doing something that's really not needed.

This post is getting pointless now.

MSR is not essential but is designed for future use, bitlocker etc.

It is so small no point in deleting it really.

End of story.

cereberus said:

This post is getting pointless now.

MSR is not essential but is designed for future use, bitlocker etc.

It is so small no point in deleting it really.

End of story.

This post for the win. Thanks for clearing this up.

lx07 said:

Except bitlocker works fine without it as well

Well, either way I wouldn't remove that partition. There's no reason for the average user to do that.

But again.. it's up to each user to decide on what they want to do but when making a suggestion to others I say be conservative with the answers.

lx07 said:

Except bitlocker works fine without it as well

This is correct. To support bitlocker:
On the MBR based partitions: System Reserved partition is used.
On the UEFI/GPT based partitions: Recovery partition is used. Not the MSR

@Mark Phelps

On win8.1, I did the "migration" that NavyLCDR suggested -- moving the stuff from the MSR into the OS partition (using EasyBCD) -- and never suffered any negative results because of that. I did that because I needed more partitions on the drive, and the MSR partition was taking up one of the four permitted.

As long as you don't use bitlocker then this is fine but if you do then bitlocker is already broken.
BTW, I think you meant "System Reserved", not "MSR"