The Win7 Hidden Partition

Just assign a letter...

 

when the setup assistent asks you how to partition your hard drive, you can install windows 7 with only 1 partition.

for example when you have only one empty drive in your pc!
first you have to format the drive so, that there isn't a partition anymore.
than you create a new one and windows will tell you, that it's gonna create one more partition, just click ok.

than you have to delete the partition you created on your own.
After that, go to the partition windows created and say expand.
expand it to the maximal size, so you can partition your harddrive after the installation process and there won't be a hidden 100mb partition

sorry for my bad english... i hope you know what i mean

 

One thing that i noticed was that it hid a recovery partition when upgrading.

I was upgrading a legit dell vista to W7, the vista installation had a 10Gb recovery partition which wasn't hidden, but now W7 is on the recovery partition is now hidden.

Its all there as i can see it in knoppix or mini xp in hirens but i guess has hidden attributes.

Another thing i found when installing on another pc, again onto a partition with vista on but not as an upgrade, (original vista was 32bit was installing w7 64bit), was that i was not asked to format, i installed with disc in from boot, and the install left a folder called old windows with the previous vista install and several other folders too.

 

Well in that case there is no partition that could be made visible either.

Apparently you installed to a drive where all the space was already formatted which means everything, including the bootfiles, should have ended up on your C:\ drive.

(To check just enable Show Hidden System Files in Windows Explorer Preferences and see if theres a BOOT folder on C:\ . If so then youve got your answer...)