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I have machine with three disk drives - Disk 0 500 GB SSD - Disk 1 4TB Mechancial Drive - Disk 2 4TB Mechanical Driver

I am installing windows 8.1 on this machine with SSD being the c:\ drive however, windows installer keeps putting a partition called "System Reserved" on Disk 1 and then splits the disk into a 2047GB partition and a 1678GB partition

What I want to do is mirror the 2TB drives in RAID 1 however, because of the partitioning scheme I have not been able to because the partitions need to be the same size.

I have tried re-installing three times and during install hit Sfit+F10 to get a command prompt then used diskpart to make sure every drive was GPT formatted but still no matter what I have tried windows picks it own partitioning scheme for this one drive.

How can I get windows 8.1 to install itself onto one drive only without using the other drive?

see attached picture of the partition

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    The easiest way it to disconnect the HDDs while you are reinstalling Windows.
    – Techpumpkin_WD
    Commented Apr 21, 2015 at 14:40
  • "easiest"... I mean, I know what you're saying, but still. For me, this was 5 drives in a RAID array. I had to disable them in the RAID config utility. Major pain...
    – THE JOATMON
    Commented Jan 7, 2019 at 22:19

1 Answer 1

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During the installation you have a partition menu and at some point you create the partition where you want to install Windows to, right? As far as I remember, at the point where you create the "C:" Partition, the "system reserved" is also created and you can see it in the menu. If you now delete both partitions and create a new "C:", no "system reserved" appears. I remember this from Windows 7 installations, but I'm not sure if this is still valid for Windows 8.1. Furthermore you can consider unplugging the two other drives during the installation or maybe disable them in the BIOS to make sure everything gets installed on the SSD.

Good luck!

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