I used Windows's MediaCreationTool21H2.exe to make a bootable USB flash drive to install Windows 10 on the SSD 2TB of my PC. The installation process starts by asking you which paritition you'd like to install Windows on.
At this point I divided my disk in 2, to install Windows on the first part. The tool asks you the size of the desired partition in "MB". There, I used "1,050,000 MB" as input, without really knowing if it was really MB or MiB...
From this, Windows actually takes some space to create some partitions (in order on the disk) :
- 1 MiB for GPT/MBR
- 100 MiB for System / EFI
- 16 MiB for Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR) / Hidden
- [Windows Boot Partition / Primary GPT partition]
- 509 MiB for Windows Recovery
- [Unallocated]
I know my input was correctly interpreted as "1,050,000 MiB" which is the total size of the partitions Windows installation has created because : the 1st sector of the last partition x 512 (sector size) + 509 MiB x 1024^2 = 1,050,000 MiB x 1024^2
Now what I don't understand is why I have a "Partition gap" between the end of the Windows Boot Partition and the partition for Windows Recovery?
It is not really an issue per se given the amount of lost space (714 240 B exactly), but I'd just like to understand :)
I thought may be it was because of some kind of alignment that the end of the Windows 10 partition must respect, but the start of the Windows Recovery partition (1,049,491 MiB exactly) is already a multiple of 512 (sector size), 2048, 4096, 8192, 1 MB, and alignment to 4 MB or 8 MB does not gives the difference I am looking for: 714 240 B = 697.5 KiB ≈ 0,68 MiB. So why Windows discards the space...
FIY: DISKPART and WMIC gives the same numbers than WinHex (except for the total size of disk since some raw space is not usable at its far end because of CHS coordinates limits)