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Aug 20, 2009
My Digital Life Editorial Team
On a fresh (custom) installation of Windows 7, where Windows 7 is installed onto a new hard disk with unallocated disk space (no partition or volume been defined yet), or when user attempts to create a new partition out of empty drive, the Windows 7 installer will create an additional partition with the size of 100.00 MB, and mark as System Reserved.
The 100MB volume is labeled as System Reserved with NTFS file system, and System, Active, Primary partition attribute with no drive letter in Disk Management. The 100MB system reserved partition is only available for Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Business and Windows 7 Enterprise editions. The 100 MB system partition is used primarily as BitLocker partition for BitLocker encryption. Additionally, it also holds the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) and boot files with boot manager for booting up the computer for troubleshooting when there is no Windows 7 installation DVD disc on hand.
The Windows 7 created 100 MB partition is not the main boot partition or boot drive, but serve only as a backup. The following files and folders are the initial content of the partition (names in [] brackets indicate it’s a folder or directory), before BitLocker is enabled and in use.
[$RECYCLE.BIN]
[System Volume Information]
BOOTSECT.BAK
For Windows 7 users who do not intend to use BitLocker, the 100 MB partition can be removed subsequently and easily in Disk Management, the built-in partition manager of Windows 7. However, users can stop and prevent the 100MB partition from been created in the first place during installation of Windows 7, via several workarounds and tricks or hacks. These hacks have slightly different from trick used to remove 200 MB partition in Windows 7 RC or Beta.
Method 1: Use Existing Partition or Partitioning Scheme
Windows 7 installation wizard will not modify existing partition which already been defined and allocated. The 100 MB BitLocker partiton will only be created when user creates new partition on a clean and empty HDD (no partitions), or delete all partitions and then create a new partition during setup. Thus, system with hard disk already partitioned, and users wish no change to existing partitioning but wish to clean install can just format the partition in Windows 7 setup wizard before installing.
Method 2: Partition the HDD Before Installing Windows 7
It’s “almost impossible” to stop or cancel the 100MB system reserved partition from been created in Windows 7 Setup (unless you uses hack 3 below). So for people you prefer to delete off all existing partitions, or want to install Windows 7 to an empty hard disk, it’s recommended to partition the hard disk before starting Windows 7 setup, through several ways.
One way is to boot up the computer with a Windows XP or Windows Vista installation CD or DVD, or any other bootable disc with disk partitioning utility, and then perform the re-partitioning. Quit the setup after finished partitioning, and start up the computer with Windows 7 DVD to install Windows 7.
For user with only Windows 7 DVD, follow these steps, as provided by :
Once Windows 7 Setup is loaded, press Shirt + F10 keys at the first setup screen (which allows selection of language, keyboard and locale). A Command Prompt window will be opened.
Run Diskpart, the built-in disk partitioning tool of Windows 7 with the following command:
Type in the following command one by one, follow by Enter key to create a partition (text in brackets are comments only):
list disk (to show the ID number of the hard disk to partition, normally is Disk 0)
select disk 0 (change 0 to another number if applicable)
create partition primary size=80000 (create a partition with 80 GB to use entire disk as one partition, omit the “size=value” use similar command to create more partition if needed or create in Windows 7 after installation)
select partition 1
format fs=ntfs quick
Type exit at command prompt to close Command Prompt window.
Continue Windows 7 installation as usual. Remember to just highlight and select the partition just created when come to partition screen.
Method 3: Trick to Remove 100.00 MB System Reserved Partition During Setup
On the “Where do you want to install Windows?” partition screen of Windows 7 Setup, click on Drive options (advanced) to delete existing partitions and create a new partition.
Click OK when Install Windows wizard prompts with the following message:
To ensure that all Windows features work correctly, Windows might create additional partitions for system files.
Two partitions should be created, a System Reserved System type partition (Disk 0 Partition 1) with 100.00 MB in size, and originally intended primary type partition (Disk 0 Partition 2) with allocated size now less 100MB.
Delete the Primary Partition created.
Click OK when prompted that “The partition might contain recovery files, system files, or important software from your computer manufacturer. If you delete this partition, any data stored on it will be lost.”
All disk space inside the partition deleted will now become unallocated space. Now, highlight System Reserved Partition, and click Extend. Assign the available disk space to the partition, and click Apply.
Click OK when promoted with “Extending a partition is not a reversible action. If you proceed, you will not be able to undo this action later.
Highlight on the extended System Reserved Partition, and click Format.
Click OK when prompted with “The partition might contain recovery files, system files, or important software from your computer manufacturer. If you format this partition, any data stored on it will be lost.”
After finished formatting, the originally System Reserved Partition will now become normal system partition, ready to install Windows 7. Proceed to install Windows 7 as usual.
Note: If you plan to create more than one partitions, all partitions should be created first before deleting one that intended to be used as Windows 7 partition.
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Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 5) - Drivers
by Thorsten Leemhuis
Hundreds of new and improved drivers significantly improve hardware support in the 2.6.34 kernel.
for Linux 2.6.34-rc7 last weekend, Linus Torvalds indicated that version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be released soon. The following article describes the advancements in terms of drivers and their infrastructure and concludes our &Coming in 2.6.34& mini series about the most important new features of Linux 2.6.34. The most important changes in the areas of network support, file systems, storage subsystem, graphics hardware and architecture as well as virtualisation were discussed in parts , ,
of the series, along with the drivers associated with these kernel areas.
by audio subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai lists the most important new features of the kernel's audio drivers, which are now
as version 1.0.22.1 of the ALSA drivers.
For instance,
8-channel audio output via HDMI for GeForce graphics cards with GT21x GPUs as well as for NVIDIA's series MCP89 motherboard chip-sets. The kernel now offers the first components of the
required to support version 2.0 of the USB audio specification. New too is
for the Xonar DS sound card by ASUS and
for the Edirol UA-101 audio/MIDI interface.
The V4L/DVB subsystem, which handles TV hardware, was supplemented with the
drivers for the Telegent Tlg2300 chip as well as the nGene driver for the identically named chip by Micronas (, ). The developers have also added the
for CpiA this chip was previously handled by cpia, a driver which has now been
for which the kernel offers different Gspca-based drivers have also been tagged this way.
The input subsystem
for touch screen interfaces by various vendors. Also new are drivers for Apple's
Vendor-specific notebook drivers will now be maintained
as part of the && subsystem. This subsystem now includes a simple
which previously only controlled display brightness and works with recent ASUS Eee PCs that use WMI for the function keys. Numerous detail improvements were made to the drivers for notebooks by ASUS, Dell, Lenovo/IBM, MSI and T these drivers were previously handled by the ACPI maintainer.
The xHCI driver for USB 3.0 controller chips, which was previously called xhci, has been renamed xhci_hcd to match the naming scheme used for other USB host controller drivers. A
by Torvalds himself now causes the USB storage driver to wait just one second instead of the previous five before it addresses a newly connected USB memory device. Various distributions reduced or completely disabled the delay quite some time ago. Torvalds says it is unclear whether devices that require such a de it could be that this issue is purely historical. The modification is designed to help c &Let's see if anybody screams& said Torvalds.
for the Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator has been added to the staging branch. Major improvements –
which enhances performance – were made to the udlfb DisplayLink driver, which is also located in the staging area (, , ).
to the rtl8192e driver are to considerably reduce the power consumption of the identically named Realtek chips during operation. The kernel developers have removed the ,
staging drivers because nobody showed any interest in developing them further. A new addition is the
for DT3155 Digitisers.
Drivers and extensions for Intel's motherboard chip-sets so far only referred to as Cougar Point and expected to be released early next year have been added to various subsystems.The AHCI driver
FIS-based switching – a technology for addressing multiple hard disks via one SATA connection which is used by some external disk housings with SATA port multipliers.Performance improvements to the CFQ I/O scheduler are among the major changes to the block layer, highlighted by maintainer Jens Axboe in .
Many further minor, but by no means insignificant, changes can be found in the list below, which contains the commit headers referring to the respective change. Like many of the references in the text above, the links point to the relevant commit in the
of the Git branch for the kernel sources maintained by Linus Torvalds at kernel.org. The commit comments and the patches themselves provide extensive further information on the respective changes.
HID, Input
Hwmonitor, I2C, Watchdog
Notebook and system specific drivers
Block-Layer, DM and MD
MFD, MMC, MTD
Other storage:
Other drivers
The previous five parts of the Kernel Log mini series have already given a detailed overview of the many changes in of the Linux kernel. All of the major enhancements have already been mentioned there, as they entered the main development branch during the first phase of the development cycle. But some small, usually not quite as important changes that fall in the &minor gems& section, were late entries to the kernel – for completeness, we have included these changes in the following list.
that allows for tethering with an iPhone device is a late inclusion, as are:
For other articles on 2.6.34 and links to the rest of the &Coming in 2.6.34& series, see . New editions of Kernel Logs are also mentioned on
via &@kernellog2&. The Kernel Log author also posts updates about various topics on
via &@kernellogauthor&.
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