I have two "system reserved" partitions, one on my SSD and one on my HDD, am i alright to get rid of the HDD one?

Btaylor45

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Jan 18, 2016
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Hi,
So i built my PC a while ago now, and managed without an SSD for most of that time.
Well the time came when i thought i should upgrade, so i bought + installed my new SSD.
Now here's where the confusion comes in...Instead of migrating windows over, i just used the disk to install it again on my SSD, so i effectively had two copies of windows on the PC. Now, i set my SSD to the primary boot drive so no worries there...

Well i ended up having to reinstall pretty much everything onto the SSD (didn't recognise programs in "programs and features", couldn't just move them all over), which left me with a hard drive full of copies of programs and windows...so what i did was selected the partition for the HDD and reformatted it. That's worked alright, but i still have a "system reserved" partition on it.

Now i'm relatively computer savvy, but i will say i'm not the best with drives. I've never had two drives in a computer before.

So first of all, i'm not even sure if my HDD is supposed to be COMPLETELY empty, or still have some folders in it (program files, program files (x86) and other files like that). Should i have?

secondly, as mentioned before, the HDD still has a small "system reserved" partition on it, which happens to show up as it's own drive with it's own drive letter (can't shake the feeling i've dug a pretty decent-sized hole here, as the one on my SSD doesn't). Am i alright to go ahead and delete that?

All i really want is to have an SSD and a HDD, all set up correctly, but i feel as if "it works, but i've butchered it a bit"... Is this all relatively normal (bar two system reserved partitions)?

Apologies for the wall for what seems like more like just clarification, but i felt i should probably explain how i did everything to save confusion.

I appreciate any answers that happen to come my way =].
 
Solution


You can install a program anywhere you like, it doesn't have to be in "program files". If you want, you...
Whenever you install Windows, anywhere, Windows creates a recovery partition, on the install drive, so I imagine that's what on your HD as well, and you are free to nuke it, since you are not booting from HD anymore. It should be relatively small 100MB or so.
 


Cool, thanks. It was more that it showed up with it's own drive letter than anything else, but I'm glad I can get rid of it.

Also, what about my hard drive being empty? i know i just reformatted it, but say if i run out of space on my SSD and want to install a program on the HDD, there would be no "program files" to install it to. would that make a difference?
 


You can install a program anywhere you like, it doesn't have to be in "program files". If you want, you can even edit your default install path to point to your HDD using registry editor.
 
Solution