Need help with some Windows trickery

[flibberdipper]

So long story short, the HDD I want to use as an OS drive for my secondary PC had a load of bad sectors which I partitioned around (it has two ~460MB partitions, a 4GB? partition and then a 215ishGB partition). I would like to have Windows install using the pre-existing partitions, meaning the system reserved crap (I know I can install actual Windows onto whatever the hell partition I want).

 

So, how would I go about making System Reserved install on to a specific partition, if the OS of choice is Windows 10? Googling just gave me a bunch of crap on how to remove the partition, so I'm hoping someone else will have more luck with it than I will.

[MrBucket101]

Don't think that's possible

[oskarha]

This might work:

 - Install windows on another drive

 - Copy the main windows partition to the drive with bad sectors

 - Use cmd from the windows install disc to make the other paritions act like system reserved partitions

[oskarha]

This might help you create the needed system reserved paritions:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14286.converting-windows-bios-installation-to-uefi.aspx

Also, i would recommend you to make yourself familiar with diskpart (disk partitioning utility in cmd).

[flibberdipper]

9 minutes ago, oskarha said:

This might help you create the needed system reserved paritions:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14286.converting-windows-bios-installation-to-uefi.aspx

Also, i would recommend you to make yourself familiar with diskpart (disk partitioning utility in cmd).

I don't need to create any. I need to make it install to a pre-existing partition.

[oskarha]

Just now, tmcclelland455 said:

I don't need to create any. I need to make it install to a pre-existing partition.

I'm not too sure if you can "convert" standard partitions into system reserved partitions.

I think your best bet is to create new partitions in the same sectors as the old ones.

[flibberdipper]

12 minutes ago, oskarha said:

I'm not too sure if you can "convert" standard partitions into system reserved partitions.

I think your best bet is to create new partitions in the same sectors as the old ones.

That's more of a hassle than it's worth, honestly. Hence why I asked the question I did.

[oskarha]

1 minute ago, tmcclelland455 said:

That's more of a hassle than it's worth, honestly. Hence why I asked the question I did.

Do you have a pic of the partition layout?

[flibberdipper]

5 hours ago, oskarha said:

Do you have a pic of the partition layout?

Yup. 

[oskarha]

6 hours ago, tmcclelland455 said:

Yup. 

 - Snip - 

How about this:

Make partitions in the bad areas, and delete the good paritions (exept for the big one).

Install windows onto the big parition, and as the only free space on the disk is the good area on the disk, windows will hopefully put the system reserved partitions there.

You have to reformat the partitions anyway as windows requires NTFS.

I have no idea if it works, but it might be worth a try.

[flibberdipper]

3 hours ago, oskarha said:

How about this:

Make partitions in the bad areas, and delete the good paritions (exept for the big one).

Install windows onto the big parition, and as the only free space on the disk is the good area on the disk, windows will hopefully put the system reserved partitions there.

You have to reformat the partitions anyway as windows requires NTFS.

I have no idea if it works, but it might be worth a try.

I tried it and Windows got 50 shades of nope.jpg.

 

Oh well, guess I'll just make the good parts of it a single partition for games.

[oskarha]

I seem to have found a solution, but it wasn't what I expected.

To start, I recreated your partition structure on one of my spare drives.

I created and deleted partitions in the manner that I described above.

This did not have the effect I intended it to have, but it did still work.

When making and deleting partitions, I reached the max number of primary partitions for an MBR disk 3 and one extended partition.

This makes it so that windows is not able to make a separate system reserved partition.

When windows cannot make a system reserved partition, it uses the main partition (C:) as the system reserved partition, hence solving our problem of the system reserved partition being put in a bad area of the disk.

So I think this is what you need to do:

 - Make sure the disk is MBR and not GPT

 - Make sure that no more primary partitions can be created on the disk (Either 4 primary or 3 primary and one extended).

 - Install Windows

 - Profit?

I hope this helps.

I did take a few screenshots underway, but I don't think these will be as helpful as they will be misleading.

[LegionOfOne]

While this might be possible i would advise against it. I think the main partition maps out where the other is during install so if you move it it wont be able to find it again. I think your unfortunately going to have to either deal with a smaller drive or buy a new one  Kind of a bummer.