If you have dig your hands well in Windows 7 then you would have noticed a 100 MB partition which is reserved by system and cannot be used by the users and neither has a drive letter assigned to it. File system on this partition is NTFS and this is not present on systems running on Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 7 Business, and Windows 7 Enterprise editions. The reason behind this partition in these editions is because these editions have support for BitLocker. The 100 MB edition created by Windows 7 is used for BitLocking and gets automatically created when we install Windows 7 on an un-partitioned hard drive which has entire space available as unallocated. Though this 100 MB partition is primarily used for BitLocking but it also saves the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) and the boot files along with the boot manager for booting up the computer in case of damage and without the Windows 7 DVD. The 100 MB partition in subject is not the main boot partition but helps in booting in case the booting fails from the normal partition. Windows users who do not use the BitLocker can remove this partition from the disk management and can also stop the creation of this partition which happens automatically during the installation.

Creation of this 100 MB partition can not be stopped directly by a click of the button but can be done with a tweak. Please not that this partition is created only on hard drives which are new totally un-partitioned or the ones which have been cleared by deleting all the partitions manually. So you should have got the tweak by now. The tweak is to create the partitions before installing Windows 7 so that Windows 7 does not create the partitions itself. Apart from this there is no way of stopping Windows 7 to create this partition. Given below are steps to create the partitions manually so that Windows Vista installation does not create partitions by itself using the Windows 7 DVD.

Insert the DVD and boot the computer from it. When you reach to the first screen which asks us to make the language selection; press Shift and F10 keys together. This key combination will give you a command prompt window for you. In this command prompt execute the following commands in the same sequence as mentioned. The commands which you have to type is given in quotes and the explanation is given in parenthesis.

  • “DiskPart” (built in disk partitioning tool in Windows Operating system
  • “List disk” (to show the count of all the physical disks connected on your computer. Note the number of Disk won which we have to install Windows 7)
  • “Select Disk 0” (0 is the disk number. Type other number based on previous command if you have to install it on another hard drive. Hard drive numbering starts with 0 so if you have one hard drive it will be numbered as 0)
  • “Clean”
  • “Create Partition Primary size=80000” (this will create a partition of 80 GB. If you wish to use the entire disk space in one partition then do not specify size)
  • “Select Partition 1” (partition numbering starts from 1 so for first partition use 1)
  • “Active” (sets the selected partition as active
  • “Format fs=ntfs quick” (performs quick format of the partition)
  • “Exit” (exits from the command prompt)