Is it possible to install Win 11 on one partition (with no recovery or boot partitions)?

Hi Guys,

With Windows 10 it was possible to 'trick' the installer to use a single partition and bypass the creation of system-reserved/recovery partitions.

I found this very convenient, as I use image-backups to create a nice, clean copy of my system partition, for backup purposes.

Recovering from an image was simple; plonk the image back onto the single partition.

However, with Windows 11, it seems that it's now not possible to bypass the creation of the two 'extra' partitions. Does anyone know a workaround and/or if this would cause problems?

Cheers,

Mike.

With Windows 11 there are supported and unsupported installations.
Supported installations use UEFI and GPT.
Unsupported installations can use Legacy and MBR or UEFI and CSM.

To properly boot BIOS UEFI a FAT32 EFI partition is typically used.

If you have no other options the unsupported options are still available.

The loss is the improved security that Windows 11 was designed to address (UEFI, Secure boot, etc.).

If you remain with a supported installation it is possible to reduce the number of partitions.

Recovering from an image was simple; plonk the image back onto the single partition.

Click to expand...

Yes.

If your bios supports bios boot mode:

You could use use mbr partition style and have a single system and boot partition.

If your bios supports efi boot from ntfs:

you might be able to have gpt partition style, just one partition and have the efi folder on the same partition.
Or mbr partition style, one partition and the efi folder on the same partition.

During installation, windows setup.exe wont set it up that way, but it can easily be done by partitioning the disk yourself.
e.g.
F10 to get cmd prompt then use diskpart to intitialize disk/create a partition
Apply the image from install.wim to the partition using dism or similar
Create the boot files by pointing bcdboot at the partition

See post #12 in this thread: