Windows 10: 50 MB system reserved partition on second drive after clean Windows install

I've installed Windows 10 on my SSD and when I tried to partition my other disk I've noticed that there's another partition here. This didn't happen any other time I was installing Windows 10 and I'm wondering if I'm fine to leave it as is or if I should do something about it.

Disk management screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/lo4wMFE

I googled about it and the only solutions I found was to either download 3rd party software or to reinstall Windows with only 1 drive plugged in, but before I try these I thought I'd ask for advice here

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:)

 

Clean Windows Installation created a very small System Reserve Partition

"Like I mentioned before, In the past Windows Installation disc would create a System Reserved Partition of at least 575 Mbytes until this last clean Windows installation"

That old 500 MB System Reserved partition may have from time when there wasn't separate Recovery partition at the end of the disk. According to Microsoft support site partition layouts of v2004 are close to what MS
has recommend to manufacturers to be used, only exception (bug) is this 50 MB System Reserved partition.

When I did clean install of v2004 on (all 5-6 system, BIOS and UEFI) I use instructions and diskpart scripts on this MS support site to get those recommended disk layouts.

Hard Drives and Partitions

 

No System Reserved Partition After Free Upgrade and Clean Install of Windows 10 Pro x64

This is my second reply to Mr Wilson_13's reply. Mr Wilson_13's answer did no answer my question. For both upgrades I did a clean install and formatted the system partition. So there was no existing system partition in either case. The two existing Widows
7 partitions were about the same size and neither had a recovery partition. I formatted the system partition for both clean installs.

The only differences were:

1) The first upgrade was done in October 2015 and the second one was done in June 2016.

2) For the first upgrade Microsoft required that Windows 7 first be upgraded to Windows 10 so that Windows 10 could be authorized and a product key could be obtained.

3) For the second upgrade I was allowed to skip the Windows 7 upgrade step and complete the clean install of Windows 10 and upgrade in a single step. I'm happy for that.

The differences after both clean installs were completed are as follows:

1) For the first clean install, two partitions were created: A 500 MB System Reserve Partition (C and and a System Partition (J. Both partitions fit in the space formatted for the system partition.

2) For the second clean install, a single System Partition (C was created.

My questions:

1) Do I need the System Reserve Partition created with the first clean install? If so how is it used?

2) Should I add a System Reserve Partition for the second clean install? If so how do I do that?

3) If the System Reserve Partition created with the first clean install is not needed, can I delete it and change the drive letter for the system partition from (J to (C? My concern here is that, programs installed on that system drive may use drive
letters for navigation. If they do, I don't want to change the drive letter because I've got days invested installing other software on the system since the clean install and I don't want to do that again.

Thanks.

Bill

 

System reserved file size 50 MB only

This 50 MB system reserved partition in MBR disk is by design in Windows 10 v2004 when default partition layouts are changed to match better for MS recommendations for manufacturers.

BIOS/MBR-based hard drive partitions

Recovery partition is located next after partition C: so that if some future update required more space on that partition then installer can automatic shrink C: to get more space for recovery partition.

UEFI/GPT disk has also hidden 16 MB System reserved partition (Partition 2) which is not shown in Disk management.

These are default disk layouts for BIOS/MBR and UEFI/GPT on Windows v2004 after clean install.