Windows Server 2019 Get-Partition and 'IFS' partition type

Question

What is the 'IFS' partition type which sometimes reported by Get-Partition? Specifically how is it related to MBR and GPT? I haven't been able to find much documentation either through Google or microsoft.com.

As seen in the Documentation and in my own output:

   DiskPath: \\?\scsi#disk&ven_vmware&prod_virtual_disk#5&1ec51bf7&0&000000#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}

PartitionNumber  DriveLetter Offset                                                          Size Type
---------------  ----------- ------                                                          ---- ----
1                           1048576                                                       549 MB IFS
2                C           576716800                                                   99.46 GB IFS

according to wikipedia, it's the "installable file system". i am not sure just what that means in this case, tho. [*blush*] — Lee_Dailey, Sep 14 '20 at 20:09
I'm really interested in why this seems to differ across the different VMs I've spot checked. — Yolo Perdiem, Sep 16 '20 at 13:39

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 07 '21 at 13:08

It's equivalent to partition type code 7 (decimal / hexadecimal) in MBR/DOS partition table, which is used for NTFS and exFAT (and HPFS) in Windows. Apparently Installable File System was the very first type of filesystem that the code was designated for, and whoever wrote the PS cmdlet(s) decided to use the initial of that to represent the code.

In GUID partition table, there are no more partition type codes. Instead, the partition type GUID:

EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

has been chosen for any Microsoft basic data partition, regardless of the filesystem on it.

Windows Server 2019 Get-Partition and 'IFS' partition type

1 Answers1