Macrium Reflect question!

ratchet,

I've used that guide dozens of times on my test computer and it never fails. You can copy and paste the lines but you will probably need to use a different drive letter. Maybe.

I dislike the SRP and don't have it on any of my computers. I don't use BitLocker. If you have a SRP you need to image and restore two partitions instead of one and you have to be aware that the SRP is the Active partition and not Win7. The SRP takes up one of the four MBR partition slots so it may prevent you from adding an extra primary partition if you have the slots filled.

There are numerous ways to remove the SRP but I think the TeraByte method is the easiest.

I suggest removing the partition and just leaving 100 MB of unallocated space unless you are familiar with Sliding and Resizing partitions. Losing 100 MB of space on a 1 TB HD is trivial.

 

Brian, all went well and thank you for the encouragement!

 

ratchet,

Nice to hear. That "nasty" SRP has gone.

 

It seems using EasyBCD is easier (I haven´t done it), http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Changing the Boot Partition.

 

I'm getting good at it as I had to do it 2X! When we travel to our children's homes I like to be able to remote the desktop occasionally. In fact, during the winter months I'll aim the web cam at a thermometer. Since I purchased an HP TouchPad during their fire sale I've been traveling with it instead of the laptop. The remote app is Splashtop and it does not work very well with the W7 firewall so I turned it off, installed Privatefirewall (I've used it and Comodo over the years) and the PC would not boot. Fortunately I did have an image on an external HD. Booted from a disk and restored the image but of course the image was from before SRP removal. Practice makes perfect!

 

With regard to Windows operating systems, the only time I can think of you'd need the extra primary partition is if you have a quadruple boot system for installation of multiple operating systems instead of simply a tri or dual-boot system. Otherwise you can create more than enough logical partitions in an extended partition for nearly any use.

Having an "annoying" 100MB system reserved partition? What's the big deal? 100MB in these days of 2 and 3TB drives is a drop in the bucket. I like that it keeps my system files out of the root directory of my system drive - keeps things cleaner as far as I'm concerned. It is created with no drive letter and is not even seen in day-to-day operations. (Unless, of course, using partitioning/imaging/etc types of software is something you do every day, of course. )

As far as it being used for larger cluster sizes, I looked and couldn't find conclusively that was the case. The link provided earlier in this thread only indicates that the user should leave enough space for the Win installation disk to create a boot partition - not that the system reserved partition (boot partition) is required to be able to boot. And besides, why? Because the Win installer which automagicaly creates the system reserved partition will not create it in a different cluster size? What about Windows 7 versions which do not create a system reserved partition? Or even for the versions that do, supposedly if you create, for instance, one large partition encompassing the whole disk it will install the OS without the system reserved partition. Is there some reason the boot files can't be on a partiton formatted with larger cluster sizes?

EDIT:
Ahh, @Mudcrab's link... BOOTMGR requires a 4096 bytes or less cluster size. Still, you do not need the system reserved partition (specifically) for this. So, I guess if you formatted an entire drive with a cluster size > 4096 bytes and tried to install Win7 using that only, it would not work.

Anyway, I concur with with @Aladdin that the system reserved partition is truly only needed for bitlocker. Obviously, it CAN be used for other things (I could store a few .txt files there just for funsies, for instance) but it is only created for bitlocker.

 

Gorkster,

I did try that. You are prevented from installing Win7 unless a SRP can be created.