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#30
Windows 10 installing System Resrved partition on separate drive
Hi Kari.
Following on from my earlier question:
Tolqua:
I noticed that Windows 10 has installed the System Reserved partition on my second (Aux) drive which is a 500GB spinner. I didn't choose this and the OS itself has been correctly installed the 'primary' SSD drive which I did specify. I was going to reinstall, but thought that perhaps there's a good reason for this since both drives were unformatted empty space. Is this the best configuration?Kari:I'm glad I looked into this further. Here's the conversation with Macrium:
System reserved partitions are as the name says a system partition. There's no reason to be worried about them, nor should they be removed. Thay are so small they do not affect your storage capacity.
Tolqua:
My comment about the System Reserved partition was not that there's any problem with it - like you say it's very small. I just wondered why Windows chose to put this on the second drive which is a 500GB spinner when the rest of the OS is on the first drive, a 256GB SSD, which is the location I specified during install. Is this normal? Is Windows doing this for a good reason? Maybe the SR partition doesn't need to be on the primary partition and Windows has put it on the HDD to conserve space on the primary partition? ...or maybe it's function is better served in a location that's physically separate from the primary? Just curious to know, really.
Kari:
I have pretty much given up to understand the placement of System reserved, and various recovery partitions created in UEFI systems. My policy: Windows knows what it is doing.
Tolqua:
You may well be right about that, but not being sure or knowing why is a bit of a leap of faith. As I said, it's likely there's a good reason Windows has put the System Reserved partition on my second drive, but I've not seen it do this before and it seems both illogical and contrary to what I understand is common good practice. For example, what happens when it comes to doing an image backup of the system - I'd normally include all OS partitions in a backup and since the image is best saved to a physically separate drive, I'd have to exclude the SR partition because it's already located on the target drive.
I'd like to take your advice and leave it alone, but as you can see, it's not that simple. Do you think it would be worth posting a new topic about this on TenFoums?
In the meantime I'll see if I can get some input from Macrium on this.
...okay, well I tried to include the conversation with Macrium (redacting as necessary), but after 30 minutes of trying I can't seem to find a way to do this that includes the in-line screen shots and preserves some degree of formatting/control. Any ideas for doing this?
The bottom line is that I was right that the SR partition should be on the same physical drive as the rest of the OS if only from a backup point of view of taking a backup image.
Even though I'd specified the SSD as the install location in the Windows installation wizard, the fact that the HDD was connected and selected by default in a 'secondary' boot sequence menu in the BIOS of this mobo meant that the SR partition got installed there. Macrium's suggestion was to disconnect the HDD during install, although once I'd found this setting and changed it, I did get the installation with bot partitions on the SSD without having to disconnect the HDD.
Windows may know what it's doing, but it's not doing a very good job here. Just as well I bothered to look in Disk Management.
Tolqua.