What is this massive system reserved partition?

errodiel

New Member
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7
Location
Newcastle, UK
Sorry if this is the wrong sub-forum; it seemed the best place.

My PC is exactly as listed in my profile specs. We added an SSD a month or so ago, and have been really happy with performance; we used this Lifehacker guide to migrate windows 8 to the SSD without re-installing. It all went smoothly, and now Windows is on the SSD (C:) and we have a 1TB Seagate barracuda as our D: drive. Browsers, anti-malware etc are installed on C:, but all data (My Documents, games, etc) are on D:.

We had noticed the C: drive filling up a little so have performed some tweaks: hibernation, system restore and defragging are all disabled. When we went into disk management to see where all our space was, we've noticed a 28.49GB partition which is marked "system reserved" and designated as a primary partition. There is then the standard C: partition (labelled primary, boot etc). There's then 349MB unallocated. The C: drive has a windows folder which is about 16GB; windows therefore has about 45GB of our 120GB hard drive at this point.

I can't for the life of me remember how the partitions looked when the SSD was freshly installed, but I seem to remember having a lot more space. So what in heck is this 28GB partition? All my googling finds reference to windows 8 needing a 100-350MB system reserved partition, not this monster. The only thing I can think of is that we tried to upgrade to windows 8.1, but the install failed. We've tried a couple more times, but gave up as a bad job (planning to wait for other people to do the de-bugging and trouble-shooting before we try again). That download was in the region of 30GB; is it now just sitting in this massive partition? If so, how do we get rid; just remove the partition? If not...what is it?!

Sorry if this is a little incoherent, I'm moderately over-caffeinated today... :confused:
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    CPU
    Intel i5-3570k
    Motherboard
    Asus P8Z77-LX
    Memory
    8GB Corsair Vengenace 1600Mhz DDR3
    Graphics Card(s)
    Sapphire HD 7870 GHZ OC edition
    Monitor(s) Displays
    37" Samsung LCD TV
    Screen Resolution
    1080-, 60Hz
    Hard Drives
    Kingston HyperX 3K 2.5-inch 120GB SSD;
    Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm HDD
    PSU
    Corsair Builder series CX 500watt
    Case
    Zalman Z9 Plus midi tower
    Internet Speed
    60gb
    Browser
    Firefox/Chrome
    Antivirus
    AVG free
No, it's a self-build - my first, and my other half's first in 10 years or so. We were both quite happy fiddling around in WinXP, but several years as Mac users has left us rusty. We've had 3-4 months to get used to windows 8, so still feel pretty unfamiliar with it TBH.

Here's the screenshot; the partition I'm talking about is the system reserved partition on Disk 1.

DskMngmt.jpg
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    CPU
    Intel i5-3570k
    Motherboard
    Asus P8Z77-LX
    Memory
    8GB Corsair Vengenace 1600Mhz DDR3
    Graphics Card(s)
    Sapphire HD 7870 GHZ OC edition
    Monitor(s) Displays
    37" Samsung LCD TV
    Screen Resolution
    1080-, 60Hz
    Hard Drives
    Kingston HyperX 3K 2.5-inch 120GB SSD;
    Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm HDD
    PSU
    Corsair Builder series CX 500watt
    Case
    Zalman Z9 Plus midi tower
    Internet Speed
    60gb
    Browser
    Firefox/Chrome
    Antivirus
    AVG free

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    ME, XP,Vista,Win7,Win8,Win8.1
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    Other Info
    Notebooks x 3

    Desktops x 5

    Towers x 4
It looks like the tutorial you followed is a little out of date. It has some comments about assuming you only have one partition on the drive, so it was not written at a time when possibly even Windows 7 was available.

So I would guess your process saw the small partition at the front and created a new one based on the information it had. You did notice the quote below in the tutorial?

I would probably start over and clone each partition, one at a time. As Theog pointed out in some of the numerous links, a Legacy install, which you seem to have, has one 350 MB recovery partition in addition to the OS partition. On UEFI installs, there is a 300 MB Recovery Partition and a Required 100MB EFI System partition with an additional 128 MB MSR partition which cannot be seen in Disk Management.

Remember, if you have more than one partition on your original drive, you want to clone the partition, not the drive. That means instead of choosing "Disk Clone," you should choose "Partition Clone," clone your Windows partition to the SSD, and stick in the repair disc when you're done to repair the bootloader.

Some SSDs come with the tools required to clone the SSD, I suppose yours did not?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Grown
    CPU
    i7 3770K
    Motherboard
    ASUS P8Z77 -v Pro, Z87-Expert
    Memory
    16 G
    Graphics Card(s)
    EVGA GTX 680 Classified (2)
    Hard Drives
    Kingston SSD 240 GB
@theog - thanks for the input, and numerous links. I'll sift through them and try to get my head round this.

It looks like the tutorial you followed is a little out of date. It has some comments about assuming you only have one partition on the drive, so it was not written at a time when possibly even Windows 7 was available.

So I would guess your process saw the small partition at the front and created a new one based on the information it had. You did notice the quote below in the tutorial?

I would probably start over and clone each partition, one at a time. As Theog pointed out in some of the numerous links, a Legacy install, which you seem to have, has one 350 MB recovery partition in addition to the OS partition. On UEFI installs, there is a 300 MB Recovery Partition and a Required 100MB EFI System partition with an additional 128 MB MSR partition which cannot be seen in Disk Management.

Remember, if you have more than one partition on your original drive, you want to clone the partition, not the drive. That means instead of choosing "Disk Clone," you should choose "Partition Clone," clone your Windows partition to the SSD, and stick in the repair disc when you're done to repair the bootloader.

Some SSDs come with the tools required to clone the SSD, I suppose yours did not?

Yep, we were aware of the limitations of the tutorial, and of that quote. We never created any additional partitions on the 1TB HDD, and I don't remember ever seeing more than one, large partition on it in disk management; we simply installed it physically in the tower, installed windows, and done. I'm aware of the principle of installing windows in one partition and sticking data in another, but we never contemplated anything like that. It is entirely possible that we've cocked up some part of the cloning process, however - seems likely in fact.

No, the SSD didn't come with any tools. We installed and looked at EaseUS before we bought the drive, and were comfortable using it to do the swap.

It's looking like the simplest thing for us to do is perhaps back-up our data and either start over as you say, or just go for a clean install of windows 8. I'm tempted to go for that in case it was some kind of software conflict that was stopping us from upgrading to 8.1 succesfully (someone suggseting that Steelseries drivers might cause a conflict and failure).

THank you all for the input - I'll go and do my reading and make a decision once I'm better informed.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    CPU
    Intel i5-3570k
    Motherboard
    Asus P8Z77-LX
    Memory
    8GB Corsair Vengenace 1600Mhz DDR3
    Graphics Card(s)
    Sapphire HD 7870 GHZ OC edition
    Monitor(s) Displays
    37" Samsung LCD TV
    Screen Resolution
    1080-, 60Hz
    Hard Drives
    Kingston HyperX 3K 2.5-inch 120GB SSD;
    Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm HDD
    PSU
    Corsair Builder series CX 500watt
    Case
    Zalman Z9 Plus midi tower
    Internet Speed
    60gb
    Browser
    Firefox/Chrome
    Antivirus
    AVG free
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