System Reserved.... I now have three ???????

[Cage]

I've just done my periodic strip-down and dust removal.

I also reconnected two hard-drives that weren't previously hooked up.

Prior to this I had two hard-drives, a SSD with my OS and a 2TB for storage, and I only had one System Reserved partition.

I now have three System Reserved partitions, all seemingly on the SSD. I can't make any sense out of the various partition sizes.

I'll attach a pic of the various partition properties. Any insight much appreciated.

Disks.JPG [ATTACH=CONFIG]110769[/ATTACH D.JPG

E.JPG F.JPG

[JJM]

I'd say the new system reserved partitions belong to the recently added hard drives. At a guess they at one time had an operating system on them and haven't had the partitions removed when they were formatted.

[arthurking83]

The two newly added partitions shouldn't be on the SSD, each one will be on the respective drive you attached.

You can hide each partition(I think they're part Master File Table and part OS booting files and/or something like that), but either way each is important for each HDD.

If you remove one of the newly added drives, one of them will (or should!) dissappear.

By default, this system reserved partition is not normally seen by a std Windows install. I reckon you've set the OS to allow all hidden files and folders to be visible or something(quite normal to do).

I'm not 100% sure on what you have on each of the other drives, but if they're just redundancy storage(eg. backup, etc) they may be important to that drive.

In the old days, if I had an old OS drive which I subsequently re used for other storage purposes, on reformatting the drive, I'd also see this 99.9Mb system reserved partition on it too.
As the drive was made redundant and the old OS installation wasn't needed, I'd use a partition managing program to absorb that system reserved partition into the entire space allocation for that drive.

Windows native HDD management tool is capable of doing this, but you can get better and still free software to do this easier if you wish too.
I currently use Macrium's free partition software.

What I reckon you have there is that the D: partition is the MFT for your OS(which is almost certainly to be C
Then on your other drives(eg. Y: and Z: .. at a guess!) .. Partition E: is most likely for Y: drive and partition G: is most likely for Z: drive.

When I see this on my PC, the latter system reserved partition is always for the latter drive in the HDD list.
(So I'll hypothesize that you have a large F: drive for storage and also a large H: drive for storage too).


If I know I have all the contents of the respective drive already backed up, then I just use Windows Disk Management to delete both the partitions on the physical disk, then format the drive again to the full capacity.
Note do this and all data on the drive is gone(almost forever) so be 101% sure that any data is already saved elsewhere.
if I think the data is safely stored elsewhere, I use Macrium to move the 99.9Mb partition into the larger partition(but not as a folder, if I see that option).

Macrium moves the smaller partition into the larger one 'non destructively'.
I only do this because I hate randomness in my drive structure .. operationally you will see no advantage or disadvantage in making any changes.
The only thing you may see tho, if you do the delete partition thing in Windows .. is that on reformatting the drive, it can speed it up considerably.
Because i have multiple backups of my important data(mainly images), I regularly format and delete drives and partitions and re do them just for a few more Mb/s speed. Can make a difference using CNX2 with D800E files!

Reality check too tho. remember it's only about 99Mb, which is about one .. maybe two D800 NEF files! ie. you don't notice the loss of space.
You can re hide the drives and unallocate the letters for those partitions if you need too.

[Cage]

Thanks Arthur.

Your answer is more or less what I was thinking, a small dedicated partition on the 'C' drive to allow it to talk to the respective additional drives.

I just didn't remember seeing it before, and yes, I have Windows set-up to show hidden files and folders.

[arthurking83]

OK then.

If you have Win Pro editions: If you have enabled Administrator tools on your Start Menu, look for the Windows Disk Management tool.

Once it populates the hardware list, you should see each of the physical drives along each line of hardware resources.
For each of those physical drives, you will see(or not) each partition for each of those drives too .. that is, (as an example) you may see one of the drives with two partitions like Partition E: and F: on the one horizontal line.
From memory, the system reserved partition almost always precedes the data partition. But once you're into WDM tool, you will confirm this for yourself.
I always remember it to be this way, but your screen captures indicate the opposite(the system reserved area is on the last few sectors of the physical drive(ie. after the data drive).

Been a while since I last dealt with this issue myself so 'I could be dreaming'

Did you once have any of those recently added drives as old OS disks on previous PCs or something?
This is the only time I've seen this on my drives, so I just assumed it comes up due to once having an old PC installation on them.
But I also think that this reserved area could have something to do with windows's system restore or some other complex internal thingiedoodle.

(hopefully someone with more intricate knowledge will know more)

Al I know is that I have successfully deleted them, and merged them into the main section of each of those respective drives where those drives have been for backup purposes.
if I see it on an OS drive, I leave it alone until it's time to do a reinstall of the OS or something. Never touch the one that is responsible for the OS HDD!!
Again for the sake of just keeping things more easily understandable, when I do a OS instal again and I have that pesky 99.9Mb partition, the first thing I do is to go into the system hard drive partition tool, delete all partitions, create a new single one size on the drive partition and install from there.

NOTE! Years back I had an old drive play up(pulled it apart later on it's it death cycle, but that's not part of this story).
Anyhow, I resinstalled my newly acquired OS and got everything up and running again .. basically a new PC. Placed the old drive into the new PC to find many old files and things I think I may have missed on the inital backup prior to the new PC.
I was certain I had everything, except I forgot to backup my emails(just silly me) but this is why I kept the old drive for about 6 months anyhow. So later on, I finally decide that this pesky system reserved partition on the old drive had annoyed me for too long now so I deleted it, and merged it into the main data portion of the old drive(for arguments sake it was a 1Gb drive) .. just annoying 6to have the pesky little 99.9Mb partition when It didn't need to be there.
After deleting the small partition, 99.9% of the data on the drive was still accessible. Lots of Windows data(folders/system files/and stuff like that) were no longer accessible which didn't bother me as I already had what I think I needed. Lots of other files were tho, so if I think I needed a document I had saved to a folder before the partition deletion, it was still there, 100% OK.
But I did lose my Thunderbird email data file. Not the emails themselves, just the files that pointed Thunderbird to where the emails were(some internal Thunderbird file thingies).
(I think)had I not deleted this system reserved partition, I could have simply found the file I needed to restore Thunderbird to a very early point in time to get the emails I needed.

I hope that made some sense. It still doesn't, to me, having dealt with it multiple times tho .. why it affects some files, but not others.
I think of it this way: if Windows made the file, and you delete the system reserved folder, you basically lose that file. If YOU make the file(that is you save it yourself to somewhere of your choosing), then the file should be safe if you delete the system reserved partition.
Like I said, it's like a MFT(which tells your OS were to look for a file or folder or data bit, or whatever)

[Cage]

Thanks Arthur.