Why do I have 2 partitons after HD reformat?

Hello all

This has been something that has been bugging me for a while as while I don't end up doing this often, in the past I have started out with a brand new Hard drive to perform a completely clean rebuild of the OS with, formatted it as you would normally and so long at its the first time I end up with one drive with only one partition and at the disks full capacity right from the start.

But then later if I have to redo it for some reason, I use what ever low level format options the drive makers give for that, (IE zero out the drive), but then when I try the same thing this second time or any time after and do all the same things for this rebuild, I always end with two partitions where one will have the OS load the OS too, then another at about 100mb that has just some basic files loaded to it such as $RECYCLE.BIN, Boot, System Volume Information, bootmgr & BOOTSECT in its explorer menu.

So I guess I could put a lot more words about why I care about this and/or perhaps in asking what could be done about this say before or after, but hopefully that will be a good place to start.

Basically the SR is were it boots from so if you encrypted the drive it could load the software to access it

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.

Is some reading there so when I can I will get to that.

As mentioned, the oddest part to me with this is why it does not do this with a brand new install of a drive, where as after what I thought was a complete wipe of all the data from it by doing a low lever zero out reformat, it does (at least I think I'm right about that).

To also provide a piece of info as like I mentioned, I decided to leave some stuff out from the OP

The reason I noticed this again is for the OS drive I have installed a couple of SSD's in RAID to my PC and am in the process of a slow migrate over just what I need to those from a set of regular drives in RAID that I have the OS now all so its a completely clean install, and for which one is the OS drive I do this via the BIOS's boot manager when I start the machine.

So just like it mentions in the article listed, when I am booted up to the set that are being used as the active OS systems, there is just the one C drive and this ghost drive is not shown which I don't mind, but for the other set that are just being treated as a spare drive then, then it shows this drive with these partitions and is a bit annoying as with all the other drives I have, its just one more to add to which is the one I want to copy something over too.

Anyway, I may post more if that is OK once I have had time to study the links provided, but that could be a week or two from now.

Thanks again.

There may be many partitions on a disk:
- System reserved - ~100M NTFS - On OEM computers, this partition has a boot loader that can take the boot sequence to Windows or to Tools wizard (maintenance or factory recover). This partition has no letter assigned.
- MS reserved - 120M RAW - Created during installation using the Win 7 installation disk - create partition on a clean disk. It is used to store bitlocker decoder (Win 7 ultimate). Unless you have Win 7 ultimate it's useless. This partition has no letter assigned.
- UEFI - 100M Fat32 - Has the boot loaders on UEFI- GPT boot able disk. This partition has no letter assigned.
- Recover Partition - ~15G NTFS - On OEM computers, this partition has an image of the original C: drive. It is used to restore the computer to the factory default using the program launched on the System reserved partition. Normally this partition has no letter assigned.
- Big NTFS - To be used by Windows, programs and data. This partition has the letter C: assigned to it.

If you want to install Windows with Win 7 installation disk and don't want the useless MS reserved - 120M RAW partition, use disk management (under Windows) to (clean all partitions the disk), create and format a partition. When installing from Win 7 installation disk choose the big NTFS partition created (under Windows with disk management).