I had to reinstall windows 7 ultimate. I deleted the windows.old directory and sub directories. I noticed that I now have a new disk partition with the drive letter e: When viewing the partition with explorer it shows no files. When I look at the partiition with partition wizard it shows: the following directories: System Volume Information Recovery Boot $recycle.bin and the following files: bootmgr bootsect.bak I'm assuming this has something to do with the recovery I attempted before reinstalling. Can I delete this partition? or can I hide it so that it doesn't change my lettering schemes so I don't have to go in change all of the settings on my software that backs up to thumb drives and external drives. thanks, Barry

Hi Barry, From the description this sounds like the Windows 7 recovery enviroment (WinRE) partition which should be 200MB in size. This helps repairing the system/boot files in the event of something going wrong with either. This shouldnt have been assigned a drive letter it should have been hidden I would suggest just removing the drive letter and leaving be as this will save having to locate the install disk in the event something goes wrong with the system/boot files, Regards Kevin

Kevin, It's 299 mb. I forgot to mention that the disk is encrypted with bitlocker. Doesn't the tpm module add a hidden partion too? Thanks, Barry

This is the BDE partition. It seems that you did not format the partition when you installed Windows 7. So the 100MB partition was not created. Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.