Slave HDD partition?

[RohitS]

Hi,

I have a slave HDD of 500GB in my system. The thing is that I am not creating partitions for this drive nor I am installing any OS here but it is showing me 100mbs as a system reserved space, I think that is for primary drive? Can I delete that and start using the HDD, it just doesn't matter for 100MB but its fr good to know purpose

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

The 100 MB volume is the "System Reserved" partition which contains the Boot Manager for the Windows installation on the primary hard drive, so you must not attempt to remove it otherwise Windows will not be able start.

In recent years, Microsoft has decided that the Boot Manager is safer on a separate partition from the main Windows partition where it used to reside prior to Windows 7 (though the idea may have been introduced with WinVista, not sure because I avoided that bug-ridden version).

There is a way to prevent the 100 MB partition being created, but it can only be achieved in the preparation stages for installing Windows. Hardly worth it just for 100 MB.

 

[ArtPog]

Since you're planning to use that 500 GB HDD as a secondary drive for storage, backup or other purposes and not install a Windows OS on it you can just leave that 100 MB System Reserved partition on the disk as Phillip recommends and go ahead of partitioning/formatting the disk if that's what you want to do. Or just use it as is as s secondary HDD.

Although Windows will not allow you to delete that SR partition through the usual Disk Management means there is a rather simple way to delete that SR partition through the Diskpart command. But the amount of disk space that the SR is taking up is trivial so there's no great incentive to delete it as long as you're going to use that disk as a secondary drive for storage purposes.