The role of hidden partitions in Win8 graphic tutorial

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 the partition, select "change drive letter and path", click "add", select a drive letter and click OK.

After you will A new partition is found in the resource manager. After opening it, you may not see anything. You can see the hidden file by checking the box that shows the hidden item:

Reminder: The file in this partition is very Important, please do not delete or move or rename, otherwise the system will not start!

As you can see, there are several files/folders:

$RECYCLE.BIN: is the recycle bin Folders used, each partition has

Boot: Boot menu BCD and corresponding multi-language location

Recovery: Contains system recovery environment (well-known WinPE modified by this image) When the main system (such as the C drive system) is destroyed, it is started to perform some recovery operations.

System Volume Information: The system restores the required directory. If you close the system restore, this directory still exists, but retains about 20K of information.

Bootmgr: The main file of the boot manager. Without it, everything will not start. You will be prompted to find bootmgr or the file is corrupt. 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 Partition!), protect the partition.

Introducing here, 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.

Some people may ask, why does my hard drive have two hidden partitions at the beginning? This is because your hard drive uses the 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.