Windows 7 Insists on 100 MB or 200 MB system partition

[midiboy]

Hi guys,

maybe you have a solution. I have a dual boot system with Vista and W7. W7 sees the 200MB partition as what it is and does not assign a drive letter. Vista however, has assigned a driveletter to that 200MB partition (D:) and won´t let me change or remove that drive letter, not even using diskpart. Any ideas how to fix this easily ?

edit: I have managed to hide the partition with Paragon Partition Manager from within Vista. That fixed the problem.

Ist this not possible without that tool ??

Thanks,

Alex

[maxXPsoft]

not creating 200mb part here at all with XP first installed and then 7 on second part although it hides the XP part in 7 which I don't like cause it rearranges the hard drives. 7 becomes C: and so forth

[mats]

There is another purpose of the 200 MB partion. Think bitlocker

[kartel]

No 200mb partition here, but I got 4 Primaries!

Also whatever OS I boot, comes up as C:

Edited February 24, 2009 by kartel

[Access Denied]

OK, for what its worth. I have installed 7 twice in the last week or so and here is are my results. First install, no 200mb partition. Second install, 200mb partition created.

No telling what this is caused by.

[Navid0]

OK, for what its worth. I have installed 7 twice in the last week or so and here is are my results. First install, no 200mb partition. Second install, 200mb partition created.

No telling what this is caused by.

It is actually very simple:

If an active system partition already exists in the system when you are installing Windows 7, the installer will NOT create a 200MB system partition.

If there is no active system partition when you are installing Windows 7, it WILL create a 200MHz system partition.

You can use another OS or GParted to create and format a new partition on the hard drive you want to install Windows 7 on and set it as active. Then, boot to the Windows 7 install DVD and install into that partition and it will not create the 200MB partition.

[Access Denied]

Makes sense now. thanx

[spacesurfer]

I'm still not clear on the pros and cons of this 200 mb partition.

Pros??

Cons??

It's only 200 mb but still it's 200 mb!

[doomangel.gr]

i think that vista was going to move to gpt instead of mbr but windows 7 is actually moving that way. Some guys even mentioned that this 200mb partition has something to do with the new winfs file system which i don't think that it is included. also someone mentioned something about efi machines, the only efi machines i can think of are the the Intel Macs.

Edited February 25, 2009 by doomangel.gr

[cluberti]

WinFS isn't technically a file system, it's a SQL-based relational engine that runs on top of an NTFS filesystem to help categorize. WinFS partially exists today in ADO.net and SQL 2008, and you can read more about it on MSDN.

Also, the rumor is that the 200MB size on the EFI partition will shrink for Win7 RTM.

[deep debroy]

This has nothing to do with a new File System or windows moving to GPT partitioning. You can draw parallels between the dedicated System Partition on MBR disks created in Win7 and the ESP on GPT disks but this is created on disks initialized as MBR (NOT GPT).

The main reason Microsoft created a dedicated System partition is to have a clean boot architecture for storage drivers that transform the OS partition and is required during booting. So, for something like bitlocker, this simplifies things since the bootmgr can come up in the regular way; load a simplified version of the bitlocker driver that facilitates booting the main OS and go ahead and load the encrypted OS volume. The same applied for VHD boot.

If you already have an active partition from another OS (like Vista) no new partitions are created.

[Legolash2o]

I've never had the 200MB partition, although when i install Win7 on my sister's and her boyfriends laptop... it always creates it, but never on my laptop.

Edited March 10, 2009 by Legolash2o

[spacesurfer]

I've never had the 200MB partition, although when i install Win7 on my sister's and her boyfriends laptop... it always creates it, but never on my laptop.

If you started with partitions already setup, then it will not create this partition.

However, if you format your drive using the GUI format, then Windows 7 will take the liberty to create the system partition.

See first post on how to avoid this with diskpart.

[cluberti]

Correct - if you pre-partition, Win7 won't create the 200MB (or, 100MB in later builds) partition. However, adding bitlocker later will be more of a pain, for one of the downsides. However, if you never plan on bitlocker for your machine, nor plan on booting with an EFI bios (and you'd know already if you were or not), you don't absolutely need it (the boot data can be stored on the same partition as Windows, but recovery may be harder later if something bad were to happen to the filesystem of the root partition).

[spacesurfer]

Correct - if you pre-partition, Win7 won't create the 200MB (or, 100MB in later builds) partition. However, adding bitlocker later will be more of a pain, for one of the downsides. However, if you never plan on bitlocker for your machine, nor plan on booting with an EFI bios (and you'd know already if you were or not), you don't absolutely need it (the boot data can be stored on the same partition as Windows, but recovery may be harder later if something bad were to happen to the filesystem of the root partition).

Great points. I'll link to first post.