System Reserved 100 Mb

I just noticed that on my install of Win7 RC that I have a partition labeled as "System Reserved 100Mb" (System, Active, Primary partition) on the main HDD. If Win7 install did that, whats the purpose??

Win7 did this. If your drive was empty, during partitioning it says it might add another drive for system recovery utilities and such. That's what this 100MB partition is for.

The boot manager lives there, automatic recovery tools live there, bitlocker when active lives there.

logicearth said:

The boot manager lives there, automatic recovery tools live there, bitlocker when active lives there.

Actually AFAIK the boot manager doesn't live there but in one of the bootable partitions (designated as System), but there are recovery & repair tools and such. No drive letter is assigned to it by default, and should remain that way.

DJG said:

Actually AFAIK the boot manager doesn't live there but in one of the boot partitions, but there are recovery & repair tools and such. No drive letter is assigned to it by default, and should remain that way.

No, the boot manager (BCD) does live there. It used to be C:\Boot in Vista or when you don't have the System Reserved partition for Seven.

Well, I just removed the System Reserved partition, which the Storage Manager was happy to comply with, and had no problems rebooting ...

The small partition actually holds Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), which only available from DVD installation disc in previous versions.

Antman said:

The small partition actually holds Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), which only available from DVD installation disc in previous versions.

Of course I had made a backup, as I am very fond of my WinRE ...

I love all wineries.