Starting from Windows 7, using the bare-metal installation method, the system will default to the hidden partition at the beginning of the hard disk, the size is about 100M. In Windows 8, the partition size is 350M, as shown below, is the partitioning situation of the system itself after I use Windows 8 new installation. (There are 15G for other purposes)
It can be seen that the disk management shows that the 350M partition has the system partition, the active partition, the attributes of the primary partition, and the latter partition is the partition where Windows 8 is located. Contains properties such as startup, page file, crash dump, primary partition, etc.
Right click on this partition, select "change drive letter and path", click "add", select a drive letter and click OK.
After you will be A new partition is found in the resource manager. After opening it, you may not see anything. You can see the hidden file by hooking the box that shows the hidden item:
Reminder: The file of the partition is very Important, please do not delete or move or rename, otherwise the system will not start!
You can see that there are several files/folders:
$RECYCLE.BIN: is the file used by the recycle bin Folder, each partition has
Boot: boot menu BCD and corresponding multi-language location
Recovery: contains the system recovery environment (well-known WinPE modified by this image), for the main system (such as C drive When the system is destroyed, it is started to perform some recovery operations.
System Volume Information: The system restores the necessary directory. If the system restore is closed, this directory still exists, but only about 20K of information is retained.
Bootmgr: Boot the main file of the manager, without it, everything will not start, you will be prompted to find bootmgr or the file is corrupted. And this file can not use NTFS compression or encryption.
BOOTNXT: If the hard drive has a non-Windows 8 system, this file is used to boot other systems.
BOOSECT.BAK: Backup of active sectors, backing up the first 16 sectors.
After browsing the file, you can right click on the partition in the disk management, select "change the drive letter and path", delete the partition number (just delete the partition number, do not delete the partition!) , protect the partition.
Introduction to this, you can see that using a separate hidden partition can complete the system repair work under special circumstances. Of course, if you don't want the system to create such a partition during the installation process, then you have to manually partition it, or use other tools before, and select the partition to install.
Someone may ask, why does my hard drive have two hidden partitions at the beginning? This is because your hard drive uses a GPT partitioning scheme. The GPT solution itself requires an EFI system partition to hold various boot loaders. Windows 8 will put the loader here, and then set up the MSR partition for emergency recovery (same as the Recovery folder), after which is the normal system partition. Similarly, ESP and MSR partitions use the Windows readable partition format, but for system security, these two partitions cannot be read and written by the user under normal circumstances.