Opinions of System Reserved in Windows 7
Hi friends :wave:
One day when I was working with VirtualBox and made a new machine there came up one quite serious problem :undecided:
It was the fact that Windows 7 want's to automatically create one extra System Reserved partition next to the real one which we been used to.
(This occur if create the new partition table with the Windows 7 CD).
So, now afterwords when made a clone of the drive were Windows 7 was installed it seemed difficult to boot this new cloned image in a new created machine. Nothing worked as it should and Windows 7 could only open up the Repair tool feature and tried to recover without success.
After a while it hitted me that I could start the virtual machine with a Live CD (iso) in the CD emulator. I had Paragon Partition Manager 10 for virtual machines, so I used it to see what was wrong and made a boot from the CD. First I couldn't see the problem as my real Windows 7 partition looked all fine and was marked as C:\ drive.
I made many attempts in repair and update MBR, test surface and so on but it doesn't seemed to help at all. Then I realized that System Reserved are known as the Boot partition in another name.:doh:
And as Windows always wants to the C drive I changed and replaced the letters from D:\ which the System Reserved had got during the clone process over to C:\. I made the same with the real Windows 7 partition which had got the letter C:\ and replaced it to D:\.
After this I restarted my virtual machine and everything worked excellent.
During one test it also seemed like that the System Reserved partition, has to and must be marked as an Active partition orelse it can't boot.
Myself have been using Windows 7 Ultimate, don't know how it looks like in all other version which don't have the BitLocker feature but heard this might exist even in Professional and assume it then should be created in all versions of Windows 7 as System Reserved contains features for Bootfiles, Repair (in all versions ?) and BitLocker functionality (in Ultimate, Business & Enterprise).
Futher on if consider how many slots MBR have support for and what might happen in a "dual/multi boot" when Windows 7 wants to install one extra partition with default label "System Reserved".
MBR can only use 4 primary partition slots and Windows can only become installed on a primary partition. Another boot map might be 3 primary slots and one extended slot which can contain additional sub logical drives, as many there is free letters for in the drive table.
Ok there shouldn't be any issues in the first setup but what will happen in the next try..Can many setups of Windows 7 partitions use one single System Reserved or does it want's to create a new one if installing through the CD in default mode and when not using other partition manager tools?
Does the risk makes sence in have multiple System Reserved?
Finally, the question of the MBR and how many primary slots it has...Why does Microsoft developed Windows 7 with a feature that decrease the possibility in how many OS it support to have installed on the same machine? I mean when install Windows 7 it wants half of the primary slots MBR has to offer and whos to blame for MBR hasn't become interesting in develop and improve for more slots, guess there is some sort of standardisation involved like MBR can't support bigger partitions than 2TB.
Feeling very curious in hear opinions/thoughts of this issue and what can be done regarding all this different aspects when dealing with clones & dual/multi boot into different host OS or virtual guests VM machines.
:popcorn:
