Forcing Windows to install on a single partition

Comments

Anonymous
August 21, 2009
The most commonly realized benefit of the 100Mb partition in Win7 is that this is where the boot loader goes. That means that you're no longer dependent on the health of a single OS partition to bring your computer up in a multi-boot environment. The other benefit, only to Enterprise users, is that this is where Bitlocker's metadata lives. In a single-boot home system, the idea was that OEMs would put their "recovery" partition data here, though we'll see if that happens. Of course, there is very little harm in leaving it as-is. Given the size of today's drives, 100Mb is a drop in the well, and since the partition doesn't get mapped by default, you won't know it's there unless you open up the disk utilities and start searching.