Imaging and the System Reserved partition

[silentvoice]

Hi all,

When installing Windows 7, setup is creating a hidden partition (around 100MB in size) on my hard drive, labelled "System Reserved". The rest of the space on this drive is allocated to a single partition (my C: drive). This hidden partition is supposed to contain files for Bitlocker and system recovery. However, do these files stay unmodified or change over time? The reason being is that I will be imaging the main partition at various stages of my system install / configuration and I'm wondering whether this hidden partition needs to be imaged each and every time as well. Or can I just take one initial image of this partition?

It's also supposed to remain as the active partition which may cause problems during the image restore process - I'll need to check though as it's a different imaging tool to what I was using in an XP environment.

I have seen steps such as these:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=267909 (see post 2)

whereby the creation of this hidden partition is avoided but is this a wise thing to do? I don't want problems cropping up down the line after carrying out the above steps.

Any help / advice would be great. Cheers.

[CaptainCrash]

I've noticed that Windows 7's own system imaging tool insists on copying the system reserved partition, as well as the C partition - you're not given the option to deselect it.

To be honest I'm not sure if anything actually changes over time in the partition itself - I'd guess Windows Update may replace some files there from time to time, so if your imaging app gives you a choice, if I were you I'd back it up every time you create a fresh image, just to be on the safe side.

AFAIK the separate 100MB partition isn't strictly necessary at present unless you're installing the OS itself to a partition >2TB - it's not really a major inconvenience though, so you might as well do things the way MS want you to and stick with the default layout.

[CWH]

Hi,
The small 200MB partition actually holds Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), which only available from a DVD installation when upgrading from a previous operating system such as Windows Vista. The partition holds system files and bootable files that are essential to boot the Windows 7 properly in the event of the need to recover the OS in the event of corruption. The 200MB partition is pretty much similar to many recovery partition that been made on factory installation by most OEMs on the computer they sold.
Also, if it's deleted by tools that don't understand it, you may get a Partition Table Error because the 200MB partition does not use the standard sector zoning format.
However, if you install 7 from scratch by either using a blank drive, or formating the drive first, you can bypass the creation of this partition and the install program will create the WinRE recovery environment in a folder in the root of Win7 installation drive. For example, if Windows7 is installed to a partition with a label of C:, the WinRE will be located located at C:Recovery.

Colin

[silentvoice]

Thanks for the replys.

I think I'll leave the partitions as they are during installation (as opposed to following that 'workaround' I linked too). I just hope the restore process runs smoothly lol.

CWH, I have been testing Windows 7 recently and each time it only creates a 100MB partition, never 200MB - unless you have a different version of Windows then Home Premium - perhaps Utilimate? Also, when installing on a new / blank drive, it will always create this hidden partition for me. I have not fully formatted the drive beforehand so this may "bypass the creation of this partition" and "create the WinRE recovery environment in a folder in the root of Win7 installation drive." It's strange why it would do this though. Why would it do one thing for a formatted drive and in my case something else for an unformatted drive.

[CaptainCrash]

IIRC it was 200MB during the beta testing, later reduced to 100MB for the release candidate and the final version.

Re its appearance (or not), this is what I've observed: the 100MB partition will *always* be created if Win7 setup finds unpartitioned space at the front of the drive - clearly that would be the case on a brand new (unpartitioned) drive, and it also occurs if the drive has more than one pre-existing partition and you delete the first (eg by going into the advanced options in Win7 setup).

If there's already a pre-existing partition at the start of the drive, the 100MB partition *won't* be created and the boot/recovery files will go into the \RECOVERY hidden folder on that partition instead - this might be the case if you'd previously used the drive for Vista or XP, or you'd deliberately partitioned the drive by another means prior to running Win7 setup.

[DarkStar_GT]

As I understand it: Bitlocker and Bitlocker To Go are exclusive features of Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Enterprise. All other Windows 7 editions do not include that feature. The partition size will be more with WinRE, I think too.

Also, I have seen references to a 1.5GB partition, which I think was the Vista requirement for the Bitlocker partition.