Brand new install on nvme: UEFI, partitioning and stuff...

[HRose]

I don't know if it's the correct forum category, I'll try here.

 

So, I'm going to assemble a brand new PC. What I've figured out so far:

 

- Have a USB stick copy of W10. Made with rufus, with the USB formatted in GPT.

- Look into the bios, set UEFI without legacy CMS. That should allow me to boot the USB installer properly configured.

 

The problems start here. I have no idea if a 970 Evo Plus comes with unallocated space or not. I suppose the W10 installer should create all the default partitions.

 

From what I understand:

- ESP, system partition, 100Mb FAT32 used to boot.

- MSR, this is a reserved tiny partition that shouldn't even appear within Windows.

- Utility partition? I have no idea what this is, Microsoft documentation says this one should go BEFORE the Windows data partition, maybe it's only required for encryption?

- Windows data, the whole thing.

- WindowsRE, recovery tools, somewhere 500Mb of reserved space. Microsoft says it should come AFTER the Windows partition but BEFORE any data partition.

 

Now, does an automatic install deal with all this? Is WindowsRE also created by default?

 

My problem is that I want to have two partitions, a smaller one around 200-250Gb with OS, and the rest in a "data" partition. So that in the case I need a Windows hard reset I only need to deal with those 200Gb of data rather than the whole disk.

 

So, should I mess BEFORE OR AFTER installing the OS? If I do it after, do I need to move or mess with Windows RE, do I put the data before or after that partition.

 

I'm fairly confused. If I go all manual I probably should allocate manually the WindowsRE, and I can't find information on ideal size and other things...

 

[AbydosOne]

2 minutes ago, HRose said:

Now, does an automatic install deal with all this? Is WindowsRE also created by default?

It will all be created when you create a new partition during the install process. Windows will prompt you letting you know it's going to make everything.

 

3 minutes ago, HRose said:

So, should I mess BEFORE OR AFTER installing the OS?

You can adjust the partition sizes during the installation.

[HRose]

1 minute ago, AbydosOne said:

You can adjust the partition sizes during the installation.

What I remember since last time (years ago) was that it was all done manually through the command line, or it didn't ask anything at all.

 

Does the default install allow me to add a data partition beside the OS main one, without going into some sort of manual mode on the command line?

[aDoomGuy]

12 minutes ago, HRose said:

What I remember since last time (years ago) was that it was all done manually through the command line, or it didn't ask anything at all.

 

Does the default install allow me to add a data partition beside the OS main one, without going into some sort of manual mode on the command line?

I recommend you to do this.

 

First disconnect all other drives. Simply to avoid confusion with which drive is which. Then boot to the Windows install media. Remove all the partitions on the drive you want to put Windows on.

 

Now if you want a separate user partition on that drive. Choose the size of the Windows partition to be default MINUS what you want the user partition to be. Install Windows to the partition it made and later once you have booted to Windows head to disk management and create a new partition out of the remaining unallocated space. Sounds good?

[HRose]

3 minutes ago, aDoomGuy said:

I recommend you to do this.

 

First disconnect all other drives. Simply to avoid confusion with which drive is which. Then boot to the Windows install media. Remove all the partitions on the drive you want to put Windows on.

 

Now if you want a separate user partition on that drive. Choose the size of the Windows partition to be default MINUS what you want the user partition to be. Install Windows to the partition it made and head to disk management and create a new partition out of the remaining unallocated space. Sounds good?

Yeah, as I said this is a brand new clean thing. I suppose I create a partition the size I want for Windows, and the installer will create by default the system, MSR, Windows, and WindowsRE just after the Windows one. And then wait after the whole installation to then allocate all the space that is left.

[aDoomGuy]

1 hour ago, HRose said:

Yeah, as I said this is a brand new clean thing. I suppose I create a partition the size I want for Windows, and the installer will create by default the system, MSR, Windows, and WindowsRE just after the Windows one. And then wait after the whole installation to then allocate all the space that is left.

Seems like the simplest way to do it, yeah.

[TudorF]

@HRose

Install Windows on that empty new drive.

You can shrink the main Windows partition later and create a new one using Disk Management.

 

After you installed Win10: Go to Disk Management, right-click your Windows partition, pick Shrink then let the tool determine how much free space you can allocate to a new partition. Then create it. Bam, new data partition.

 

[HRose]

I thought about that but the problem with shrinking is that Microsoft suggests the RE partition comes right after Windows. If I use the whole drive, then shrink Windows to add a data partition, then I'd have RE at the end of the disk, rather than after Windows. I think.

 

Another doubt I had is that SSD wear with writes, so if I use a smaller OS partition that might overuse a zone of the drive, while the rest is in a much better state. But from what I read SSD works differently and always use uniformly the actual physical space, regardless of how partitions are sized.

 

But then I read some contradicting infos, saying that if the OS partition is almost full it degrades (even if the rest of the SSD is empty), or that sometimes old SSD need to be cleaned to restore their performance.

[TudorF]

@HRoseRecovery partition goes before the Windows partition. And it's created automatically by the installer. Here' an example of a typical disk structure for a Windows installation:

 

Recovery ~500MB (might vary depending on OEMs)

EFI

Windows

 

If you use some utilities that read partitions on the physical disk, you might also see a few small chunks between these, created for alignment purposes.

I wouldn't worry too much about SSDs, they're not made to last forever. It's just a question of getting enough value out of them until you swap in the next.