How to properly install Windows on a system with multiple drives

As you know, in all my Windows Installation guide such as:


NBR Windows 10 Clean Installation Guide

NBR Windows 7 Clean Installation Guide

I recommend if you have multiple drives on your computer to ensure that you only have 1 drive physically connected to the system otherwise Windows will place the boot files on the 2nd drive that it finds, that is especially true if that 2nd or 3rd drive was active, as in, it was previously initialized either as MBR or GPT and has a partition on it.

This is bad for many reasons:

1) If that second drive was an HDD, then you get a slightly slower boot

2) It causes headaches when wanting to create a system backup image via Macrium Reflect or any other Imaging system because, the imaging software is going to backup the first drive, which DOES NOT have the boot files, so if for any reason in the future you decide to restore to go back to a clean install, the boot files may not be copied properly of if the boot files were corrupted, then the original image backup file does not include the boot files.

I know this is a headache to remove all your other drives every time you want to format and especially now with Windows 10 we are getting a new built every few months so this may not sound so practical

After 10s of formats, I figured out that if you have a 2nd partition on the 1st drive, then Windows will NOT place the boot files on the 2nd or 3rd physical drive even if they are presently installed and active in the system

So to sum it up, let's say you have a 512GB or 1TB SSD as your 1st drive

Make a 120GB or 200GB partition for C:, then create a 2nd partition D: with the remaining space!

to get an exact partition size, always add 565MB (for Windows 10) to the partition size, when doing the calculation, always also add a 0.1GB to the size that you want. if you don't do that, a 200 GB partition will appear as 199.9GB in Windows.

Example:

You want a 200 GB partition for C: (OS)

The Math:

200.1 x 1024 = 204,902.4

Let's round that figure to an even number so it would be 204,904 MB

now let's add 565MB. Why? because those are the MSR / System reserved partiiton which Windows will create, if you don't add 565MB, then when you create the 200.1GB partition you'll see that the partition where you want to install Windows on is 199.4 GB

so..... 204,904 + 565MB = 205,469MB

that my friend, will give you a 200GB partition in Windows

 

Thanks for that info.

 

HaHa. In Time for new Windoze install Don't forget to bump this fall also. More will come from the Morons Hq

 

Huh, never knew about the 565MB or 0.1GB tricks. Good to know

 

This always angered me.

 

It's just a number. There is no practical difference beside anxiety.

 

The practical difference is the amount of storage gained/lost by formatting in a certain way

 

But you should never get close to full capacity, especially on SSDs. Both the file system and the flash translation layer need breathing room. If ~0.6GB makes a meaningful difference you are having big trouble one way or another.

For the SSD, as long as you keep total flash usage under a certain limit whether a part of the logical address space is mapped to a partition (but not used) or not makes zero difference. For the file system, it might make a bit of difference in allocation behavior, but when the difference is visible your file system's allocation table must be so busy that write operations would likely be at a crawling rate.

 

A good idea to add in the IEC vs SI prefixes.

Windows, Linux and OS X all display data sizes differently.

The values shown in Windows are actually in IEC sizes, so if you see a disk drive that shows 931 GB, it's actually 931 GiB, or 931 x 2³? bytes, which is almost exactly one trillion bytes, or 1 TB. OS X uses the SI prefixes, so WYSIWYG: if you see a disk that has 1000 GB of storage, that's what it has. Linux (and BSD, for that matter) is also WYSIWYG but it uses the IEC prefixes, so files would be '5.5 MiB' or '2.7 GiB' rather than the '5.5 MB' or '2.7 GB' you see in Windows.

 

Does two partitions on one disk affect Bitlocker in any way? Thought I read it somewhere but can't remember where..