Partition a hard drive during Windows setup The only way to prevent Windows from creating another partition is to partition hard drive before installing. Therefore, to make full use of the primary partitions is to allow Windows to be installed into one partition without generating a system reserved partition or system recovery partition. Besides, you can only have three primary partitions if you have logical partition(s) on the same disk. Because Windows 11 only supports UEFI boot mode. Otherwise, for those people who want to install multiple OS on one MBR drive, the 4 primary partitions are really precious. If your computer supports UEFI boot mode, you can convert MBR to GPT disk for Windows 11 without data loss. Since GPT disks can have multiple primary partitions as you like, it is no big deal to have one or more extra small partitions on a GPT disk, but things will be different for MBR disks, because you can have at most 4 primary partitions on a MBR disk.

Why create partition before installing Windows 11/10/8/7?īy default, Windows will generate a system reserved partition (on MBR disk) or recovery partition (on GPT disk) and C: drive if you select an unallocated space to install Windows operating system (OS).

Disk management in operating system