Windows 8 setup partitions

jhwk6957

jhwk6957

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 14, 2011
Messages
146
I am installing Windows 8 on my new build. I have already installed windows 8 on my laptop and I like it a lot. When Installing the OS on my laptop, Windows created 2 partitions, the primary system partition, and the 350MB recovery partition. When attempting to install it on my desktop however, Windows is trying to create 4 partitions: 1: 300MB Recovery partition, 2: 100MB system partition, 3:128MB MSR (Reserved) partition, and 4: 232.2GB Primary partition. Why is this?

Note: I have a 240GB Samsung 840 SSD and I have AHCI enabled in the Bios. (Desktop)
and a 128GB Kingston HyperX SSD in my laptop. Have really no Bios options worth noting on my laptop.
 
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Sorry I can't answer your question, but I would strongly advise you to leave all but the Primary partition alone!
 
The 100MB system partition (which is the ESP partition) and the 128MB MSR partition are required for GPT boot disks, which means you are using the newer GPT partition scheme rather than the old MBR partition scheme. Don't mess with these. If you attempt to remove them, you will no longer be able to boot that drive.

The 300MB Recovery partition is part of the Windows Recovery Environment (Win RE), which lets you do System Repair, System Restore, Windows Backup Disaster Recovery, and more; it's like WinPE but better. You want to have this.
 
Evil is spot on.

If you want to reinstall without these, you'll have to do one of two things, depending on your motherboard.

1 - Set the BIOS/EFI settings back to BIOS mode (should be a toggle)

2- When you boot to the installation media, make sure you do not select, for example, "EFI USB Device", which would install in EFI/GPT boot mode.
 
To add to the others, it means you are installing in GPT mode, which is what you probably want. MBR is for older systems, GPT allows EFI booting which has benefits like fast booting, secure boot, and support for HDDs > 2TBs as a boot drive.
 
Are GPT disk more resistant to losing partitions with the redundant partition entries?

It seems like most drive errors I work on chkdisk to repair lost partitions.
 
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Thanks for the Info! I am going to install and just let Windows do its thing.
 
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