SSD - 2 NTFS Partitions, 1 FAT Partition?

happened to do a chkdsk recently and discovered that my newly formated ssd drive, with my newly installed win8p/64 os on it, is divided into 3 partitions including 2 ntfs partitions and 1 fat32 partition as follows:

c - vol 1 - ntfs 111gb hdd boot
c - vol 2 - ntfs 300mb hdd hidden
c - vol 3 - fat32 100mb hdd system

i was certain that the entire drive was set to format using ntfs, really don't know how the fat32 format worked its way into the deal, in fact i was under the impression that the default setting for windows 8 installations was ntfs? interestingly, when i look at the drive in disk management it shows as ntfs. anyway, is this a problem, having my system partition fat32 formatted? will this cause decreased performance and/or disk limitations? if so (and even if not), should i reformat the system partition to ntfs (i understand there are tools that can do this without having to wipe the disk or lose data? any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Welcome to EightForums.

The partitioning is OK for UEFI mode.



As the new MOBO's now have a UEFI/BIOS firmware.
How to install Windows 64 bit on a UEFI/BIOS firmware:
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...e-firmware-interface-install-windows-8-a.html

having my system partition fat32 formatted

,leave it as is it only 100megs and it for use by win8 , It contains bootable files to boot your computer in recovery mode and such

The terms "boot" and "system" partition are rather misleading. Windows is actually installed on the boot partition while the boot files are on the system partition. I don't know why, all I know is that it has been like that for a long time. Windows 8 must be installed on an NTFS partition and it is. NTFS is not very efficient with such small volumes as 100 MB and in this case I don't know if it would even work. Do not attempt to modify the small partitions in any way. They are not for your use.

thanks very much for the input guys, much appreciated and very helpful. lmiller7, embarrassingly i didn't even notice that the system partition (fat32) was only 100mb while the boot partition (ntfs) was 111gb - given, as you accurately point out, the misleading disk descriptions i think my mind just saw that the boot partition was 111mb rather than the actual 111gb, and that the system partition was 100gb rather than the actual 100mb.... as such i was thinking that my actual operating system was on the fat32 partition, make sense? anyway i'm relieved to hear that my mixed format formations isn't an issue and equally relived to find that my os is on an ntfs partition.

btw, i followed the forum's instructions when i formatted my new drive and installed windows 8 using uefi, but revisiting the instructions i'm wondering why i ended up with just three partitions instead of 5 as shown in the instructions and above, any thoughts? at least i'm almost certain that i used uefi when doing the installation...

Up to and including Vista the OS could be installed on FAT32 or NTFS. Some older systems even used FAT16 but the maximum partition size (4 GB) precluded that for Vista. But starting with Windows 7 the OS must be installed on NTFS. The OS installer will not offer the choice of creating a FAT32 partition and attempted installation on a FAT32 partition will fail. Even Windows 8 fully supports FAT16 and FAT32 partitions but only for data, not the OS.