How to Avoid Reserved or Hidden Partition in Windows 7

Posted

July 28, 2009
by Brian Jackson

Comments

3 Comments

There is a hidden partition created by default in Windows 7. This can be very frustrating, especially for IT administrators who are working with capturing and deploying images with Sysprep and ImageX. The boot files needed for Windows 7 to boot correctly are stored on this 2nd hidden partition. This will show you how to install Windows 7 on one partition.

Step #1

First, there is no way to simply delete this hidden 100MB partition in Windows 7; you simply have to reformat. So the first step is to backup your data and boot to the Windows 7 Install CD. (To boot to CD, restart your computer and normally it will be either DEL, F12, or ESC key to select CD-ROM drive, and boot to it)

Step #2

Once you are up to the Windows 7 screen, you will need to select “Repair Your Computer” option.

Windows 7 Startup Repair - Picture provided by About.com

Step #3

Next you will need to select “Command Prompt”.

Windows 7 Command Prompt - Picture provided by About.com

Step #4

In Command Prompt we are going to reformat your hard drive in a certain way so the 2nd partition doesn’t automatically get created when you install Windows 7. Here are the comands:

Diskpart
List Disk (You might have more than one hard drive)
Select Disk 0 (By default your main boot drive will be disk 0, check it)
Clean
Create Partition Primary
Select Partition 1
Active
Format FS=NTFS Quick
Exit

Step #5

Then simply walk through installing Windows 7 as you would normally. This time the setup will not create the 100MB hidden reserved partition.

http://annarborcomputerrepair.info/ Ann Printer

Interesting. Just pulled up your blog post doing a search for XP repair.

I like XP but it can be tough to fix sometimes. (But it is still easier for me to understand than NT!)

Thanks for posting.
ash

Brian,
Are you doing this to all of your images or have you found some workaround? I was running into the same issue when I thought about trying to keep Dell’s diagnostic partition. I’m so bad with the sysprep/MDT stuff as it is that these additions are maddening.
http://www.brianleejackson.com Brian Jackson

@ash : Funny you mention this, I had about 20 images for different models and yes, this was done on each image so that when they are applied they don’t have that 100MB partition. However, just recently discovered that all my images were already hardware independent, Windows 7 is simply amazing. Cut our images down from 20 to 2; a 32 bit Windows 7 image and a 64 bit Windows 7 image. I tested this by deploying a Dell Latitude D620 image on a Dell GX755 and it worked perfectly!! Amazing. Now we have two images, and if anything goes wrong I can always inject a new driver into one of the images. But this cuts down the time creating images dramatically.

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