So for 99% of us, BitLocker isn't an option-and thus isn't a legitimate excuse to saddle us with a System Reserved partition.Īs for the Recovery Environment argument, note that you'll still have a RE with or without a System Reserved partition. The rub is that BitLocker is only available in the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7. In a BitLocker'd system you would begin booting from the unencrypted System partition, it would load the encryption driver, and you'd then have access to the encrypted Boot partition. IOW, you can't encrypt the entire hard disk. In order to encrypt the Windows partition with BitLocker, you understandably have to have unencrypted access to some place from which you can load the BitLocker driver/program.
(That's where you get to if you press F8 at boot time and choose 'Repair my computer'.) 'To the best of my knowledge, the System Reserved partition has only two purposes: to allow BitLocker to be used on the Windows partition, and to provide a 'safer place' for the Recovery Environment files. Two folders, Boot and System Volume Information. My 100 MB partition contained 28 MB of data.
