Hiding the “System Reserved” partition in Windows Server 2008

drive-letterswindows-server-2008

Windows Server 2008 SP2 assigned a drive letter to the 100MB "System Reserved" partition during install. It's not supposed to do that (should leave it with an unassigned letter) and it's also bad because it is now visible as a drive like any other on the system. Can't get rid of the drive letter in disk mgmt since it's marked as a "system" partition.

I don't mind having the partition there but I really don't like having a letter assigned to it. What to do?

Best Answer

Here is what seems to be your problem. As you posted:

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.0.6002  
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Microsoft Corporation.  
On computer: ADAPP02  

DISKPART> list vol  

Volume      Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info  
----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------  
Volume 0     F                       DVD-ROM         0 B  No Media  
Volume 1     D   System Rese  NTFS   Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System  
Volume 2     C                NTFS   Partition    136 GB  Healthy    Boot  
Volume 3     E   Apps         NTFS   Partition    272 GB  Healthy    Pagefile

If I'm reading this right, you've somehow managed to get the flags swapped between the System Reserved and the actual System partition. Windows won't let you change the drive letter of the System Partition, which in this case is the wrong partition. There isn't a way to change this short of hacking the partition table directly. This was set on install.

This is actually a dangerous config, since it's probably possible to change the drive letter of the drive that has the \Windows directory on it. That's supposed to be the drive flagged System, but that patently isn't the case here. Fixing this will require reinstalling your Server 2008. Or if that's not possible, you'll just have to live with the fact that %SystemRoot% is not C:\Windows.

No I don't know how it happened. It looks like a bug to me. If you have the option, calling Microsoft about it would be a good idea.

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