Windows 10: Why is a there a 50MB "System Reserved" partition on my tertiary drive?

I have 3 drives. A 250GB boot NVMe SSD, a 1TB SATA SSD, and a 2TB HDD. The way windows manages the drives however is that the HDD is disk 0, 1TB SSD is disk 1, and my boot drive is disk 2. There are two partitions on my boot drive reserved for the system, which is normal for windows, however, there is also a partition on my HDD that is titled "System Reserved" and has its own drive letter, D. Windows also decided to put the main pagefile on my HARD DRIVE, which I just changed. I've attached a screenshot of Disk Management. Does anyone know why this would be the case?

:)

 

Recovery Partition vs System Reserved Partition

Thanks for all the info guys.

Both original & target SSD's are listed as MBR as opposed to UEFI. I may have created a partition unknowingly in getting the original/new unformatted drive recognized, but I don't recall taking any steps that Windows did not step me through.

Not that an upgrade to WIN 10 Pro is contemplated, but I suspect that having no System Reserved partition will not allow that to happen, after seeing how the original WIN 10 upgrade created a problem for some WIN 7 users that had a smaller 100mb vs 500mb System Reserved partition.

 

Clean Instal Windows 10 only has 50mb system reserve and i cannot create a system image ?

You shouldn't need to setup partitions during a clean install, unless you want a specific size for the C:\ drive.

Looks like a clean install of version 2004 creates a 50MB System reserve partition which affects using Create a system image in Backup and Restore (Windows 7) which is a good reason for not using that to create a system image. It is no longer supported and
now just survives as a legacy backup routine.

You should consider using a more robust 3rd party backup program as listed in earlier posts.

Insider builds are the same for the System reserve partition and I would suspect this may turn out to be the new norm.

 

"Windows 10 couldn't be installed - we could update the system reserved partition"

I think you mean "could not update", not "could".

Suggestions:

• Disconnect any other hard drives.
• Run chkdsk /f on the System Reserved partition. You'll have to do this from the CMD prompt in Repair Mode.
• Initially there were reports of some System Reserved partitions being too small for the upgrade. Search for details if the first two suggestions fail.