How Can I Move/Delete The System Reserved Partition?

I was recently messing around with installing Windows 8 on an external USB 3.0 HDD (NOT a flash drive) (How To Install Windows 7 On USB Flash Drive or External Hard Drive), and found website that showed a method for doing so by way of a "NT6 Fast Installer". I tried many times to get it to work and just when I was about to give up it finally succeeded. I rebooted into the external drive (unplugged my internal HDD) and it finished installing successfully. After booting/logging in for the first time I noticed that performance was near-native to what it would be if you ran it from an internal HDD. Games even ran well. But I noticed that there was only 1 partition and no System Reserved, and it appeared that the boot files were located on the C drive.

So my question is, on a regular 8 installation to an internal HDD, how can you delete System Reserved and move the boot files to the C drive? Is there any advantage in doing so (or disadvantages)? I just figured that with a C drive and a System Reserved that makes 2 primary partitions out of an available 4 being taken up, by having everthing on C you would only have 1 primary partition and 8 would still work. The steps listed at the above website are meant for 7 and Vista, but I tested them to the tee and they worked without modification on 8. I just had to flag the partition as active/bootable before booting into it for the first time, or else it would throw an error. I know alot of people think that it cant be done or is hard to do, but it can. But that's not what I'm trying to prove. It essentially amounts to being almost the same thing, if not exactly the same, as Windows To Go, except that you're installing via an unofficial method since the official installer wont allow installation to a USB HDD.

Thanks for any help!

Enigma said:

ISo my question is, on a regular 8 installation to an internal HDD, how can you delete System Reserved and move the boot files to the C drive?

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YES ... you can. If you want to use an app to do that, download and install EasyBCD from NeoSmart Technologies. Their app has a menu where you can "migrate" the boot loader folder & files to another partition, in this case, the OS partition.

Is there any advantage in doing so (or disadvantages)?

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Performance-wise, no.

It does give you one less partition on your drive -- which is useful to folks who want to install another OS and discovered their drive already had the max of 4 primary partitions on it.

It's primarily there so you can encrypt the OS partition -- but if you're not using encryption, it's just another partition.

@ Mark: Thanks for answering. I am interested in having one more primary partition available, which is part of the reason why I asked in the first place. But I also plan to install Linux Mint, and with everything on the C drive that makes one more primary available out of a max of 4. I am also interesting in using TrueCrypt to encrypt the system drive (C:\) later on, but do I need to move the boot files elsewhere before doing so, or is it OK to encrypt them too? Is it possible to boot Windows, either via an official or unofficial method, if the boot files are also encrypted (i.e. I leave them on the C drive)?

Thanks!