bootmanager in W7

[Jeff]

I have a new laptop that came with pre-installed Windows 7 home premium
64 bit. It had 2 partitions when it arrived:

1) a large partition labeled "C: Local Disk"
2) a small 200 mb partition labeled "D: System"

Looking at the contents of D: I see it contains the following folders:
a) recycle.bin
b) Boot (which seems to contain language files)
c) System Volume (which I cannot access)
and a file "bootmgr"

Questions:
Why does this partition that contains the bootmgr and boot file have a
drive letter? Should this _not_ have a drive letter to avoid accidental
injury?

If I remove its drive letter, will the laptop still boot correctly?

Thanks.

Jeff

 

[LouB]

I have a new laptop that came with pre-installed Windows 7 home premium
64 bit. It had 2 partitions when it arrived:

1) a large partition labeled "C: Local Disk"
2) a small 200 mb partition labeled "D: System"

Looking at the contents of D: I see it contains the following folders:
a) recycle.bin
b) Boot (which seems to contain language files)
c) System Volume (which I cannot access)
and a file "bootmgr"

Questions:
Why does this partition that contains the bootmgr and boot file have a
drive letter? Should this _not_ have a drive letter to avoid accidental
injury?

If I remove its drive letter, will the laptop still boot correctly?

Thanks.

Jeff

It may well be a recovery partion in case the main C: drive gets blown
away by malware or other problems.
I believe most machines come this way nowdays. Leave it alone!

 

[Jeff]

It may well be a recovery partion in case the main C: drive gets blown
away by malware or other problems.
I believe most machines come this way nowdays. Leave it alone!

Kind of small for a recovery partition. No? Only 32 MB of the 200 MBs
are used.

 

[Jeff Layman]

Kind of small for a recovery partition. No? Only 32 MB of the 200 MBs are
used.

Recovery partition D: on my HP laptop (same OS as yours) is around 10Gb.
That includes quite a bit of HP crapware and a free Office 2007 trial, but I
agree with you that 200Mb is far too small for a recovery partition. What do
the vendors/manufacturers say that partition is for?

 

[Jeff]

Recovery partition D: on my HP laptop (same OS as yours) is around 10Gb.
That includes quite a bit of HP crapware and a free Office 2007 trial,
but I agree with you that 200Mb is far too small for a recovery
partition. What do the vendors/manufacturers say that partition is for?

Thanks. That's why I think it is the old mbr partition and am wondering
why it has a drive letter.

This laptop is also a HP. Now that you mention it I do not see where
they have the restore partition. Not a problem because I have multiple
image backups and created the restore CDs. Just curious.

 

[Louis Rost]

Kind of small for a recovery partition. No? Only 32 MB of the 200 MBs
are used.

Bootmgr and the content of Boot directory make up the boot loader in
Vista and Windows 7. It replaces NTLDR and boot.ini found in XP
systems.

So, it appears your D: partition contains the boot loader. Diskmgmt
will probably identify it as the active, system, boot partition.
Without the D: drive your system cannot boot.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:20:31 -0500, "(e-mail address removed)"

Bootmgr and the content of Boot directory make up the boot loader in
Vista and Windows 7. It replaces NTLDR and boot.ini found in XP
systems.

So, it appears your D: partition contains the boot loader. Diskmgmt
will probably identify it as the active, system, boot partition.
Without the D: drive your system cannot boot.

To add a bit: the recovery partition (and yes, it will be around 10GB)
is probably not assigned a letter, so it can only be seen in the disk
manager.

Click on the start orb, start typing "Create and format hard disk
partitions" (w/o quotes), and when it becomes visible above, select it.

That application will show you any hidden partitions and tell you a bit
about them.