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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a
"Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter |
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#2
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
On 02/02/2019 05:05, Peter Jason wrote:
Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter Formatting doesn't delete the partitions automatically. You need to delete them manually using the cmd line. I could give you the instructions here but Keith will find it patronising so I suggest watch the video here as it gives all the essential cmds and you will feel nice that you have done it yourself and not some GG person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lTrZopRtE8 -- With over 950 million devices now running Windows 10, customer satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows. |
#3
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
Peter Jason wrote:
Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter Administrator Command Prompt diskpart list disk select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk clean # This removes the partition table exit Now go back to Macrium and see if any partitions are present. A 4TB disk benefits from the usage of "GPT" when Disk Management prompts for initialization information. The two options are MBR (MSDOS partition) and GPT partitioning. MBR is for disks up to 2.2TB in capacity. GPT allows defining partitions past the 2.2TB capacity range. Using GPT on a 4TB drive makes the entire 4TB capacity available to you. GPT has an MBR, but the MBR will have one entry whose value declares the disk is actually a GPT disk. The MBR can have a single partition declared of type 0xEE and having a size of 2.2TB (covers the entire size of disk storage that can be defined via MBR). This is a "protective" declaration that prevents legacy tools from messing the disk up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_P...ive_MBR_(LBA_0) GPT has a partition table. The table has a size of 128MB and holds up to 128 declarations of 1MB size each. GPT can hold 128 partitions, while MBR holds 4 primaries or 3 primaries and a bunch of logicals (in a linked list). ******* On a GPT boot drive, there can be a 100MB FAT partition, which contains UEFI boot materials for an OS partition on the drive. If it's being used for that purpose at the moment, the label on the partition will say System or ESP or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition There could be other partitions, but they would likely be larger. A 450MB reserved or recovery partition or something. It could be that you're seeing the 100MB ESP FAT one. If you were careless when installing the OS, the 4TB disk and the disk with the boot partition (the actual C: in other words), could be housed on two different disks. If you deleted the 100MB FAT, maybe it causes the OS to stop booting. I don't really know the best way to do the equivalent of "boot-info" for this situation. Certain of your partitions are marked according to their function ("system" partition, "boot" partition, active partition on MBR setups). You want to thoroughly examine Disk Management display and *make sure* the weeny partition in question is not actually marked as being part of your current booted setup! But other than that, if you know you've been careful when installing the current running OS, by *not* having any other disks except the disk receiving the OS in place, then chances are it's safe to delete the 100MB FAT partition. You should be able to use "clean" as described above. Note that, TestDisk is a notorious pig when it comes to "detecting" stuff on disk drives. If you ever expect to be using TestDisk in the future, you should spend three hours and do a "clean all" instead. This prevents any smelly sectors being left behind that TestDisk will read and trip over. In my experience with GPT disks, what I do is "more than clean". I use dd and just erase the first 10GB of the disk for good measure. That usually prevents a few other utilities other than TestDisk from getting upset with what they sniff. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1048576 count=10000 How to use the Windows port of "dd" is described here, and starts with "dd --list" in an Administrator Command Prompt window. This generates the labels needed for the "of=" specification, so that you erase the right part or parts of a disk. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd That's the basic concept of how to clean a disk. If you use the "clean all" command, that zeros the entire 4TB drive which takes several hours. If you don't know how to craft a dd command to do the job, "clean all" works just fine. I use "dd" method because it is faster (deleting 10GB instead of 4000GB). "Clean all" has its benefits too, as every sector with the word "NTFS" gets cleaned out, and there is then no danger of TestDisk tripping over such sectors in future. This sequence cleans the entire disk. diskpart list disk # If all your disks have different sizes, the one # you want will stand out better. select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk!!! clean all # This "zeros" the entire disk. Unrecoverable. exit Paul |
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
On 02/02/2019 05:05, Peter Jason wrote:
Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter The space used is negligible and if you read what MS say about it they put it on disks for a good reason. |
#5
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
MikeS wrote:
On 02/02/2019 05:05, Peter Jason wrote: Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter The space used is negligible and if you read what MS say about it they put it on disks for a good reason. That's not the reason for removing it. You want to keep your configurations as simple as possible. If a data drive is a data drive, it should not have boot materials that a Windows 10 OS Upgrade mistakes as a target. Some people don't unplug drives during OS upgrade (or the upgrade "sneaks up on them"), and it's better to be prepared. Paul |
#6
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
On 2/2/19 12:31 AM, Paul wrote:
[snip] GPT has a partition table. The table has a size of 128MB and holds up to 128 declarations of 1MB size each. GPT can hold 128 partitions, while MBR holds 4 primaries or 3 primaries and a bunch of logicals (in a linked list). Sounds right, but why would a GPT and a declaration be that large? Accroring to Wikipedia, the GPT is 17KB (default, 128 declarations) including protective MBR, and a declaration is 128B. There is a second GPT at the end of the disk, which is 16.5KB (no copy of MBR). [snip] -- Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "The point of existence is not to find the most powerful thing you can imagine and then grovel before it. The idea revolts me" -- unnumbered atheist |
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 2/2/19 12:31 AM, Paul wrote: [snip] GPT has a partition table. The table has a size of 128MB and holds up to 128 declarations of 1MB size each. GPT can hold 128 partitions, while MBR holds 4 primaries or 3 primaries and a bunch of logicals (in a linked list). Sounds right, but why would a GPT and a declaration be that large? Accroring to Wikipedia, the GPT is 17KB (default, 128 declarations) including protective MBR, and a declaration is 128B. There is a second GPT at the end of the disk, which is 16.5KB (no copy of MBR). [snip] At a guess *everything* on modern disk alignments is on 1 megabyte boundaries, for some NAND-flash related purpose. I don't know what happens to the concept of RAID metadata, the kind which is normally in the last 8 megabyte cylinder. RAID metadata is set back a bit from the end of the disk, and in MSDOS partitioning I think the size is likely to be a cylinder or so. Such materials stored at the end of the disk, are never shown by any utility (with the exception of the Hex Editor you use to find such things). I actually zeroed out a disk once, just so I could "see" the non-zero RAID information put there by a BIOS. Paul |
#8
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
On Sat, 02 Feb 2019 01:31:57 -0500, Paul
wrote: Peter Jason wrote: Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter Administrator Command Prompt diskpart list disk select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk clean # This removes the partition table exit Now go back to Macrium and see if any partitions are present. A 4TB disk benefits from the usage of "GPT" when Disk Management prompts for initialization information. The two options are MBR (MSDOS partition) and GPT partitioning. MBR is for disks up to 2.2TB in capacity. GPT allows defining partitions past the 2.2TB capacity range. Using GPT on a 4TB drive makes the entire 4TB capacity available to you. GPT has an MBR, but the MBR will have one entry whose value declares the disk is actually a GPT disk. The MBR can have a single partition declared of type 0xEE and having a size of 2.2TB (covers the entire size of disk storage that can be defined via MBR). This is a "protective" declaration that prevents legacy tools from messing the disk up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_P...ive_MBR_(LBA_0) GPT has a partition table. The table has a size of 128MB and holds up to 128 declarations of 1MB size each. GPT can hold 128 partitions, while MBR holds 4 primaries or 3 primaries and a bunch of logicals (in a linked list). ******* On a GPT boot drive, there can be a 100MB FAT partition, which contains UEFI boot materials for an OS partition on the drive. If it's being used for that purpose at the moment, the label on the partition will say System or ESP or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition There could be other partitions, but they would likely be larger. A 450MB reserved or recovery partition or something. It could be that you're seeing the 100MB ESP FAT one. If you were careless when installing the OS, the 4TB disk and the disk with the boot partition (the actual C: in other words), could be housed on two different disks. If you deleted the 100MB FAT, maybe it causes the OS to stop booting. I don't really know the best way to do the equivalent of "boot-info" for this situation. Certain of your partitions are marked according to their function ("system" partition, "boot" partition, active partition on MBR setups). You want to thoroughly examine Disk Management display and *make sure* the weeny partition in question is not actually marked as being part of your current booted setup! But other than that, if you know you've been careful when installing the current running OS, by *not* having any other disks except the disk receiving the OS in place, then chances are it's safe to delete the 100MB FAT partition. You should be able to use "clean" as described above. Note that, TestDisk is a notorious pig when it comes to "detecting" stuff on disk drives. If you ever expect to be using TestDisk in the future, you should spend three hours and do a "clean all" instead. This prevents any smelly sectors being left behind that TestDisk will read and trip over. In my experience with GPT disks, what I do is "more than clean". I use dd and just erase the first 10GB of the disk for good measure. That usually prevents a few other utilities other than TestDisk from getting upset with what they sniff. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1048576 count=10000 How to use the Windows port of "dd" is described here, and starts with "dd --list" in an Administrator Command Prompt window. This generates the labels needed for the "of=" specification, so that you erase the right part or parts of a disk. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd That's the basic concept of how to clean a disk. If you use the "clean all" command, that zeros the entire 4TB drive which takes several hours. If you don't know how to craft a dd command to do the job, "clean all" works just fine. I use "dd" method because it is faster (deleting 10GB instead of 4000GB). "Clean all" has its benefits too, as every sector with the word "NTFS" gets cleaned out, and there is then no danger of TestDisk tripping over such sectors in future. This sequence cleans the entire disk. diskpart list disk # If all your disks have different sizes, the one # you want will stand out better. select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk!!! clean all # This "zeros" the entire disk. Unrecoverable. exit Paul Thanks, I used the "Diskpart" "listdisk" "Select disk 5" etc, but I then typed "clean" which it did but did not remove that small partition. I repeated the procedure but wiith a "clean all" at the end but this is taking ages (10min so far), and I wonder if things are stuck? |
#9
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
Peter Jason wrote:
On Sat, 02 Feb 2019 01:31:57 -0500, Paul wrote: Peter Jason wrote: Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter Administrator Command Prompt diskpart list disk select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk clean # This removes the partition table exit Now go back to Macrium and see if any partitions are present. A 4TB disk benefits from the usage of "GPT" when Disk Management prompts for initialization information. The two options are MBR (MSDOS partition) and GPT partitioning. MBR is for disks up to 2.2TB in capacity. GPT allows defining partitions past the 2.2TB capacity range. Using GPT on a 4TB drive makes the entire 4TB capacity available to you. GPT has an MBR, but the MBR will have one entry whose value declares the disk is actually a GPT disk. The MBR can have a single partition declared of type 0xEE and having a size of 2.2TB (covers the entire size of disk storage that can be defined via MBR). This is a "protective" declaration that prevents legacy tools from messing the disk up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_P...ive_MBR_(LBA_0) GPT has a partition table. The table has a size of 128MB and holds up to 128 declarations of 1MB size each. GPT can hold 128 partitions, while MBR holds 4 primaries or 3 primaries and a bunch of logicals (in a linked list). ******* On a GPT boot drive, there can be a 100MB FAT partition, which contains UEFI boot materials for an OS partition on the drive. If it's being used for that purpose at the moment, the label on the partition will say System or ESP or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition There could be other partitions, but they would likely be larger. A 450MB reserved or recovery partition or something. It could be that you're seeing the 100MB ESP FAT one. If you were careless when installing the OS, the 4TB disk and the disk with the boot partition (the actual C: in other words), could be housed on two different disks. If you deleted the 100MB FAT, maybe it causes the OS to stop booting. I don't really know the best way to do the equivalent of "boot-info" for this situation. Certain of your partitions are marked according to their function ("system" partition, "boot" partition, active partition on MBR setups). You want to thoroughly examine Disk Management display and *make sure* the weeny partition in question is not actually marked as being part of your current booted setup! But other than that, if you know you've been careful when installing the current running OS, by *not* having any other disks except the disk receiving the OS in place, then chances are it's safe to delete the 100MB FAT partition. You should be able to use "clean" as described above. Note that, TestDisk is a notorious pig when it comes to "detecting" stuff on disk drives. If you ever expect to be using TestDisk in the future, you should spend three hours and do a "clean all" instead. This prevents any smelly sectors being left behind that TestDisk will read and trip over. In my experience with GPT disks, what I do is "more than clean". I use dd and just erase the first 10GB of the disk for good measure. That usually prevents a few other utilities other than TestDisk from getting upset with what they sniff. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1048576 count=10000 How to use the Windows port of "dd" is described here, and starts with "dd --list" in an Administrator Command Prompt window. This generates the labels needed for the "of=" specification, so that you erase the right part or parts of a disk. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd That's the basic concept of how to clean a disk. If you use the "clean all" command, that zeros the entire 4TB drive which takes several hours. If you don't know how to craft a dd command to do the job, "clean all" works just fine. I use "dd" method because it is faster (deleting 10GB instead of 4000GB). "Clean all" has its benefits too, as every sector with the word "NTFS" gets cleaned out, and there is then no danger of TestDisk tripping over such sectors in future. This sequence cleans the entire disk. diskpart list disk # If all your disks have different sizes, the one # you want will stand out better. select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk!!! clean all # This "zeros" the entire disk. Unrecoverable. exit Paul Thanks, I used the "Diskpart" "listdisk" "Select disk 5" etc, but I then typed "clean" which it did but did not remove that small partition. I repeated the procedure but wiith a "clean all" at the end but this is taking ages (10min so far), and I wonder if things are stuck? Are you sure you're on the right disk ? Yes, selecting clean on a 4TB disk is going to take a while. Let's try some math. 200MB/sec at start. 100MB/sec near the hub. Call it 150MB/sec average delete speed. 4000000 1 hour ------- x -------- = 7 hours or so 150 3600 sec Hey, that sounds like a long time... You can stop that any time you want. Try control-C. If that doesn't work, there's always Task Manager (if disk activity is showing in Task Manager as a column, you might see the disk activity charged against NTVDM or similar - it probably won't be listed by its right name or anything). Be careful. The disk won't have a declaration after that, so you can start Disk Management again, and it will prompt for "MBR or GPT" as would be usual on a new disk. Whatever that partition was, it's blasted by that steamroller by now... You can even avoid Disk Management entirely, go back to Macrium Reflect and "restore" a backup you made. And the backup will likely have disk identifier materials recorded in it. It won't remain nameless for long. Paul |
#10
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
On Tue, 05 Feb 2019 01:49:14 -0500, Paul
wrote: Peter Jason wrote: On Sat, 02 Feb 2019 01:31:57 -0500, Paul wrote: Peter Jason wrote: Though having twice formatted a 4TB HDD, a "Microsoft Reserved Partition" is visible on the disk in Macrium, though not in Disk Management. It partition seems unecessary because the computer boots up when this disk is disconnected. How do I delete this "Microsoft Reserved Partition"? Peter Administrator Command Prompt diskpart list disk select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk clean # This removes the partition table exit Now go back to Macrium and see if any partitions are present. A 4TB disk benefits from the usage of "GPT" when Disk Management prompts for initialization information. The two options are MBR (MSDOS partition) and GPT partitioning. MBR is for disks up to 2.2TB in capacity. GPT allows defining partitions past the 2.2TB capacity range. Using GPT on a 4TB drive makes the entire 4TB capacity available to you. GPT has an MBR, but the MBR will have one entry whose value declares the disk is actually a GPT disk. The MBR can have a single partition declared of type 0xEE and having a size of 2.2TB (covers the entire size of disk storage that can be defined via MBR). This is a "protective" declaration that prevents legacy tools from messing the disk up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_P...ive_MBR_(LBA_0) GPT has a partition table. The table has a size of 128MB and holds up to 128 declarations of 1MB size each. GPT can hold 128 partitions, while MBR holds 4 primaries or 3 primaries and a bunch of logicals (in a linked list). ******* On a GPT boot drive, there can be a 100MB FAT partition, which contains UEFI boot materials for an OS partition on the drive. If it's being used for that purpose at the moment, the label on the partition will say System or ESP or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition There could be other partitions, but they would likely be larger. A 450MB reserved or recovery partition or something. It could be that you're seeing the 100MB ESP FAT one. If you were careless when installing the OS, the 4TB disk and the disk with the boot partition (the actual C: in other words), could be housed on two different disks. If you deleted the 100MB FAT, maybe it causes the OS to stop booting. I don't really know the best way to do the equivalent of "boot-info" for this situation. Certain of your partitions are marked according to their function ("system" partition, "boot" partition, active partition on MBR setups). You want to thoroughly examine Disk Management display and *make sure* the weeny partition in question is not actually marked as being part of your current booted setup! But other than that, if you know you've been careful when installing the current running OS, by *not* having any other disks except the disk receiving the OS in place, then chances are it's safe to delete the 100MB FAT partition. You should be able to use "clean" as described above. Note that, TestDisk is a notorious pig when it comes to "detecting" stuff on disk drives. If you ever expect to be using TestDisk in the future, you should spend three hours and do a "clean all" instead. This prevents any smelly sectors being left behind that TestDisk will read and trip over. In my experience with GPT disks, what I do is "more than clean". I use dd and just erase the first 10GB of the disk for good measure. That usually prevents a few other utilities other than TestDisk from getting upset with what they sniff. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1048576 count=10000 How to use the Windows port of "dd" is described here, and starts with "dd --list" in an Administrator Command Prompt window. This generates the labels needed for the "of=" specification, so that you erase the right part or parts of a disk. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd That's the basic concept of how to clean a disk. If you use the "clean all" command, that zeros the entire 4TB drive which takes several hours. If you don't know how to craft a dd command to do the job, "clean all" works just fine. I use "dd" method because it is faster (deleting 10GB instead of 4000GB). "Clean all" has its benefits too, as every sector with the word "NTFS" gets cleaned out, and there is then no danger of TestDisk tripping over such sectors in future. This sequence cleans the entire disk. diskpart list disk # If all your disks have different sizes, the one # you want will stand out better. select disk 3 # Make sure you have selected the correct disk!!! clean all # This "zeros" the entire disk. Unrecoverable. exit Paul Thanks, I used the "Diskpart" "listdisk" "Select disk 5" etc, but I then typed "clean" which it did but did not remove that small partition. I repeated the procedure but wiith a "clean all" at the end but this is taking ages (10min so far), and I wonder if things are stuck? Are you sure you're on the right disk ? Yes, selecting clean on a 4TB disk is going to take a while. Let's try some math. 200MB/sec at start. 100MB/sec near the hub. Call it 150MB/sec average delete speed. 4000000 1 hour ------- x -------- = 7 hours or so 150 3600 sec Hey, that sounds like a long time... You can stop that any time you want. Try control-C. If that doesn't work, there's always Task Manager (if disk activity is showing in Task Manager as a column, you might see the disk activity charged against NTVDM or similar - it probably won't be listed by its right name or anything). Be careful. The disk won't have a declaration after that, so you can start Disk Management again, and it will prompt for "MBR or GPT" as would be usual on a new disk. Whatever that partition was, it's blasted by that steamroller by now... You can even avoid Disk Management entirely, go back to Macrium Reflect and "restore" a backup you made. And the backup will likely have disk identifier materials recorded in it. It won't remain nameless for long. Paul Thanks, I let it run overnight & the diskpart confirmed the clean. It's a 4TB HDD so should I use NPFT or exFat for it? |
#11
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Deleting "Microsoft Reserved Partition"
Peter Jason wrote:
Thanks, I let it run overnight & the diskpart confirmed the clean. It's a 4TB HDD so should I use NPFT or exFat for it? +-----+-----+------------------+ | | | NTFS | +-----+-----+------------------+ Once the partition management is defined, \ / just create an NTFS partition. NTFS is journaled +----+----+ and recoverable. | When a disk is "new", as your newly cleaned one is, you need to define "MBR or GPT" when prompted by Disk Management. A 4TB disk is too large for MBR as a partition management scheme. MBR is limited to 2^32 or 4 billion sectors, or 2.2TB of space. GPT handles larger. GPT keeps a 128MB partition with just partition table entries in it. ExFAT might be a good choice for Flash based storage. But I find support isn't universal enough, to make it a part of "life in the computer room". Right now NTFS is the exchange media. Only if approaching my old Mac might I use FAT32 instead (or, use FTP since the fastest I/O on the Mac is via the network). Macs can read NTFS, but they may or may not write to it. There's probably some agreement between Apple and Microsoft on the matter. I've not heard a rationale for why NTFS writes aren't supported. The NTFS journal allows "dirty" shutdowns on a computer, without too much risk of disk corruption. That's a reason for using it. But you don't want to get into a habit of testing that. For example, Linux regularly dirty dismounts EXT4 partitions (Live media, at shutdown time), and not a lot of users notice that their time is being wasted on the next boot, with an FSCK being conducted to clean up the partition. The developers who did this, seem to revel in testing the ability of EXT4 to recover. But that's not why we have journaled file systems - it's not intended to be run like a roulette wheel. Any more than we should insist the airbags deploy, every time we drive a car. Paul |
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