Windows 10: New 1803 version created a new disk partition - Can I reclaim it?

Thank you for the quick confirmation, Ed. I think a blog post will be quite helpful to many. It happened on 1 out of 2 systems that I updated to 1803.

Yes, right-clicking wasn't helpful in Disk Management. *Sad

MiniTool Partition Wizard looks quite handy. I ran DISKPART to save me the time, but I'll keep that bookmarked!

 

Yep, I have seen those reports too.

Safest thing to do is to just un-assign the drive letter.

This is how my EFI/GPT based system look like, which is following Windows recommendations:




The MS "System Reserved" is missing for some reason, but normally that is also included. My recovery partition is also empty, but I could put WinRE or another custom recovery image there for easy repair.

 

It's an excellent tool: I blogged about it for Win10.Guru on April 17: Toolkit Item: MiniTool Partition Wizards (MTPW). Worth installing and getting to know.
--Ed--

 

Can you please tell me if I have done OK?
I unassigned the letter, but I also wiped *Shock it. I wasn't able to merge it to C drive.

 

Now what you can do with MiniTool Partition Wizard is move the FAT32 100 MB partition to the front of the drive. Then delete the 16MB (Other) partition. I've never had luck moving it. That is the Microsoft System Reserved (MSR) partition. If you want to recreate - make sure to apply the changes in MiniTool Partition Wizard and then exit it. Run the diskpart command. Then recreate the MSR partition using the command:
select disk 0
create partition MSR size=16
exit
exit

Then you can go back into MiniTool Partition Wizard and move the front of C: drive to add the unallocated space to C: drive.

NOTE: Disk 1 in MiniTool Partition Wizard is Disk 0 in diskpart!

Code: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.1] (c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.17134.1 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. On computer: MAIN-DESKTOP DISKPART> select disk 0 Disk 0 is now the selected disk. DISKPART> create partition MSR size=16 DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition. DISKPART> exit Leaving DiskPart... C:\WINDOWS\system32>exit[/quote]

 

[/quote] You can move the MSR partition using Macrium Reflect. You basically make an image backup, then restore backup using drag and drop so the EFI, MSR and C drive are all next to each other leaving the unallocated space to the right of the C drive.

However, a lot of work for very little gain.

The MSR partition is a mystery, and it is not even needed for bitlocker in fact.

 

I've never seen a computer affected at all when it was missing.