This “system reserved partition” is used for two things:
- When booting from an encrypted volume (bitlocker), some bootfiles simply can’t be crypted. They reside on this partition
- Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE)
If you do not need bitlocker and you want to keep things simple (e.g. for imageing purposes), you might want to remove this partition when installing Windows. In this example i assume there’s only one drive and it’s empty.
- Start Windows setup as usual
- At the screen where you select your language, keyboard and locale, press Shift+F10. You now enter a dos prompt.
- diskpart
- list disk
- select disk 0
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- format fs=ntfs quick
- exit
- exit
- now resume setup as normal, but select the primary partition at the partitioning screen