Windows 10: How to boot Win10 without the System Reserved Partition ?

It is possible in Win8. If it is possible in Win10, I'd like to know how.

:)

 

Is it safe to increase the size of my System Reserved partition in a Win7/Win10 dual boot?

I have Windows 7 and Windows 10 in a dual-boot state (Win10 installed after Win7, both on different drives); but my Win7 installation does not create a separate
System Reserved partition. I assume that all Win10 files which are stored in a
System Reserved partition are stored in the System Reserved partition created by Win7...

...But there is one problem: As a stand-alone OS, Win10 creates a 500MB
System Reserved partition, and my Win7 System Reserved partition is only 100MB, and my dual-boot Win10 installation is using or sharing the Win7
System Reserved partition, since it was created first.

Here's the dual-boot screen:





Here's the dual-boot setup in Win10:





And here is the dual-boot setup in Win7:





Given a test run, I discovered that, with Win7 and Win10 on your machine, you can't have 2 separate
System Reserved partitions (one on the Win7 drive and one on the Win10 drive), because upon boot of one OS or the other, errors, blue screens and the need to repeatedly check the disks for consistency have the potential to corrupt either one OS or
both.

Since my assumption is that the Win7/Win10 dual-boot setup shares the same
System Reserved partition, is it safe to increase the size of this partition to 600MB (100MB for Win7 + 500MB for Win10), especially with the possibility that Win10 may dump enough files into this partition to completely fill or overwhelm the original
100MB that was created with the Win7 installation? I have Acronis Disk Director 12, which can resize any volume, before or after the OS partition.

 

Only 28 MB of 100 MB available in System Reserved for Win10 upgrade?

Hi Jessen:

Thanks for your reply. I am still concerned about there not being enough space in the system reserved partition to allow an update install of Windows 10. I have another pc with a clean install of the Win10 Tech preview installed from an ISO. That
install automatically created a 500 MB System Reserved partition and it shows only 140 MBs open space left.

With only a 100 MB system reserved partition on the NUC pc I'm going to upgrade from Win7 to Win10 and only 28 MBs of that remaining, will the Windows 10 upgrade succeed? The system reserved partition was created by the Win7 install program and it shows
"100 MB NTFS Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition). The (C partition says "167.58 GB NTFS Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition." Since the system reserved partition says Active isn't it needed to boot the PC and will Windows 10
be able to use a system reserved partition with only 28 MBs free?

 

Yes it is. At minimum if you have EFI you need 2 partitions - An ESP containing your boot files as that is where EFI system looks, and your OS partition. MS recommends a 128MB MSR (Microsoft Reserved) partition as well before the OS partition but it will boot and run fine without.

For a BIOS install you only need 1 partition (unless you use bitlocker). I have a BIOS install and have just one partition - the recovery files are placed on C:\.

 

Thank you. I'm a bit thrown by all those acronyms. I got advice elsewhere that worked PERFECTLY for me. It requires a new install but then does what is needed. I reproduce it here :
Choose custom install and then select the advanced drive options. The advanced drive options will give access to the partitioning tools. Delete all but the System Reserved Partition. Then stretch the System Reserved Partition to the
size you want the Operating System Partition to be. Once the system reserved partition has been resized, continue with the installation.

 

I don't know what you mean by system reserved partition really. There is your MSR which is microsoft reserved partition which is not required, fixed in size and probably not what you mean.

If you mean you want you C: drive to take half your disk (or whatever) then at install time do pretty much as you describe above - delete all the partitions and create one the size you want. You'll then end up with empty space after that you can format as a data partition. You should only do that on an empty disk though.

Is that what you want to do? If not please post a picture of your disk management and explain what you are trying to do - dual boot, leave space for a data partition etc.

 

Yes you can boot without the system reserved partition. Just copy the bootmgr to C. Here is my little tutorial that shows you how too do it. It is very easy:

Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD - Windows 7 Help Forums

PS - It works in Windows 10. I just tried it out.

 

Yes you can boot without the system reserved partition. Just copy the bootmgr to C. Here is my little tutorial that shows you how too do it. It is very easy:

Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD - Windows 7 Help Forums

PS - It works in Windows 10. I just tried it out using build 10049.

 

"and probably not what you mean.": I'd say the opposite. MSR qualifies for the (extra) partition I want to not have. As I reported above, I am very happy with the results of the procedure I outlined. "You should only do that on an empty disk though" I did it on a disk, all of whose space was available to the O/S. Because you have asked me to 'explain what you are trying to do', I will go into the following complex rant.
CLONING exists and allows me to make a WORKING copy of a system. I can afford to ruin that copy by experimentation-that-goes-wrong, because I still have 'the original'. When technology was less reliable than now, I learned to keep copies of the last few stages of my system - as I changed-it-for-any-number-of-reasons. I did that by having a few suitably sized partitions on a much larger hard drive, and clone the most recent system over the partition with the oldest system on it. But the cloner I use, can only clone one partition to one other. A Win10 system comes as a pair of partitions, so I want to reduce that to ONE, to be able to continue my security habit.

 

For BIOS based PC one partition is fine. You can either install it on one partition (by formatting the partition manually at install time as you did before) or move the boot files as @whs describes in his tutorial. It works fine - I use one partition on 10.