I’ve always wondered why the hell Microsoft needs their own version of a “/boot” partition they call “System Reserved” which takes up hundreds of Megabytes of space right at the beginning of your disk..

Here’s the answer. Apparently, it’s used for Bitlocker and boot manager code/database contents.

Note that this partition only shows up when you install windows on a clean drive with no existing partitions.

The more you know….

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.