Personally I would not use a used drive mate they are really cheap at the moment - depending on what size you want of course. if it is for just a boot drive then a 120GB would be ideal and even a 60GB one would do.
Any brand these days is good as a general rule though I stick to the better known brands like Samsung (the bets in my view) Corsair, Crucial, and SanDisk.
i followed the instructions to the letter but it tells me there is no room to partition the hard driveand it wont let me install on the windows install bit because the partitons are incorrect
Hello Scotty,
How were you wanting to set up the hard drive?
If you were wanting to do a clean install of Windows 7 on a blank drive, then you could follow the steps below to do so. When you get to steps 7 and 8, delete all partitions until the disk shows as unallocated, then select the unallocated space to install to. :)
Clean Install Windows 7
Hi all!
I've recently followed this informational tutorial and have a few questions. I've provided a screenshot of the Disk Management. I created two partitions: System Reserved and a Local Drive (C).
System Reserved
200 MB NTFS
Healthy (Primary Partition)
Local Drive (C)
238.28 GB NTFS
Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
My question is whether the System Reserved partition needs to have "active" and "System" in addition to the "Primary Partition". As you can see in the screenshot it only has Healthy (Primary Partition) rather than Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) like I've seen on my other computer which was done having the Windows installation disk create the partitions. Also, its assigned a drive letter (D) that isn't present on my other computer.
Thanks in advance for any help.
That's cuckoo.
In an typical installation, you would have:
System Reserved marked as system, active, and primary, without a drive letter.
C would be marked as boot, page file, crash dump, and primary.
That's what would happen if you had no partitions of any type and had then installed Windows to a blank drive in the standard way.
In your case, C is marked system. "System" means that's where your boot files are. Normally, they'd be on System Reserved.
So, I'm guessing you did not install in the standard way and instead made partitions first, before installing Windows---rather than letting the installer make the partitions during the installation process??
I'm wondering why you made a System Reserved manually?
You don't need a System Reserved. I don't have it. If you want to make partitions first, you'd typically just make C and end up with C marked as system, active, primary, boot, crash dump, and page file after you installed Windows to that manually made partition.
Did you name that partition "System Reserved"?? I'm not sure what its purpose is now, since it is not marked "system" or "active".
Does the PC boot and operate OK? If so, I'd expect that the System Reserved partition is superfluous and unnecessary--boot files are elsewhere.
Yes, I did it manually thinking that I needed to create a System Reserve partition that way while in DISKPART. After more thought, I think I forgot to set the System Reserve partition as "active" when I continued with the installation using the Windows installation disk.
It seems to work fine, though. No problems booting. I'm just wondering if I should delete the System Reserve partition as I don't think its serving any useful purpose as you surmised and reallocate it to the C drive or leave it as unallocated.
Does that sound like a viable plan? Or would setting the System Reserve partition as active fix it?
Thanks for the reply.
Well---System Reserved in your case is not empty. There's 18 mb of something on it.
I do not know if that something is needed or not. Let others comment.
You could always do it over. Make C only in diskpart, exit diskpart, continue with the install, and end up with no System Reserved at all. That's what I'd do if I wasn't sure about that 18 mb of stuff on your System Reserved.
System Reserved is needed for the "Bootlocker" capability in Windows, but I don't care about that capability. It's possible that the 18 mb of stuff is related to that.
What was your motivation in manually creating System Reserved and C, rather than letting Windows create both?
I don't think changing SR to "active" would accomplish anything. You want one active partition.
Well, I wasn't sure whether I needed to create a System Reserve partition or just let Windows installation disk create it since I was doing a clean re-installation on my computer according to the tutorial thread "SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation". For some unknown reason I got it in my head that I had to manually create that particular partition as I wasn't quite sure it was going to be created by the Windows installation disk.
I'm wondering if me omitting that step (not setting it active) while creating that partition caused that problem.
I don't know, either, what the 18 MB of data on that partition. I using Windows 7 Home and not the Pro version which from my limited understanding has the bitlocker (or is it bootlocker?) capability.
Anyway, would hate having to start all over since it took forever to download all the Windows updates! I'll wait and see if others have a solution regarding this issue before I head down that LOOONG road of doing another clean install.
Last edited by Sky Ranch; 22 Mar 2015 at 12:28.
My error. You are correct. It is "bitlocker".
BitLocker Drive Encryption - Microsoft Windows
I went ahead and deleted the partition after much thought. Everything works fine, and so far no problems booting after deletion. It doesn't look like it was serving any purpose like the system partition and was probably recognized, in name only, as a System Reserve Partition. All that's left is 201 MB of unallocated space that can't be extended to the C partition. Something I can live with.
I'm still thinking the the source of this issue was probably due to not setting the partition "active" when I created it using DISKPART and followed it with the installation of Windows. I don't know.
Much thanks for the help, ignatzatsonic.
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