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Deleting the Win7 system reserved partition

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shadowdr

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 10, 2001
Wow what a weekend I have had. In preparation for my new SSD that will come tomorrow I decided to try and delete the 100 mb system reserved partition that Win7 installed. It is not that I care about 100 mb of space or recovery options but I backup using partition images onto USB drives. Ghost is one of the few that will allow partition images instead of full disk images and that saves a lot of backup room. Win7 is almost immune from decay so I have not needed to restore since I first installed and became a little complacent about it. I even tried a couple of freeware programs that do images so that I could recommend them or not to others. Turns out not,

It seems that the almost hidden partition is not a regular partition and disk imaging software does not handle it correctly. It does copy it but it cannot reimage so that Win7 can use it as a boot partition or recovery environment, in fact after a reimage it says the partition is not valid or has an error but I found this out to late. After searching here for a good while, I turned to the internet and found this how to for deleting the partition. worked fine using diskpart right up until the end where the boot files are copied to C:. It would error and not complete. Like a fool I thought that I would just reboot and do a repair, not gonna happen. Windos7 can't see the raid array at all and asks for me to load drivers for the disk. Hmm, Ok I attach the USB drive and load the raid array drivers even though Win7 has them on the DVD, error loading drivers. So I try to reimage the disk from my USB backup, thats when I find out that the partition is now in an error state. My C: partition is still there so I go back to Ghost and image it to another USB drive, Windows can't see it or the raid drives but Ghost still can.

So now I am thinking that I will just boot the DVD and install Windows on the C: partition and can reimage after I get a booting install and again Windows will not see a working drive, grrrr. I then think about using Ghost to reimage the hidden partition by itself. It does so and I get the missing boot manager message upon reboot but it does know that the drive is there. I load up the DVD and do advanced install on the C: partition, finally I see windows for the first time in 5 hours. I restart and reimage the Ghosted partition and after rebooting I am presented with repair options, seen this before but it seems different and I allow Win to attempt repairs and reboot. At long last it boots to a windows OS choice and I pick the Win Pro recovered option and bang, my desktop loads.

Now you might be wondering why I would make such a long post about this. It is because I think that I found an easy way to remove the partition without using diskpart and without getting a borked install and you can still use imaging programs to back up your install. What the guide did not say was that the CMD must be run as administrator, so instead of entering CMD from the run box Go to programs, accessories and right click CMD to run as admin, enter this command, BCDBOOT c:\windows /s C:, and it should work, if it does not, go no farther. If it does complete go to disk management and right click the C: partition and go to make partition active. When you reboot Windows will have assigned a drive letter to the previously hidden partition and you should now be able to delete it and expand the C: partition to recover the unallocated space. The last step I have not tried because of fear but I will attempt it now(deleting and expanding) and will edit post if it I am successful.

Edit: Complete success with a small caveat, computer management will not expand a partition to the left, stupid I know. I did already have Easeus Partition manager installed, it was one of the freeware backup programs I was trying out, and it did recover the unallocated space into the C: partition so now I am ready for my SSD that should be here tomorrow. I hope that this will help someone who would like to be able to use imaging software that the hidden system partition disabled. I know that this could be avoided by partitioning the drive beforehand but it must be done by Win7 because only Win7 actually aligns partitions correctly and fixed the partition table so that imaging and copying does not cause file name errors, MS should rethink the whole hidden system partition. One other thing, you will want to make a recovery disc in case something goes wrong in the future and the recovery partition is gone.
 
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I have documented my experiences with these lovely partitions. :thup:

I did find that in my search and thought about linking there myself as it does explain in more detail how bad it can be and how difficult the fix. It did tell me that that 100mb had to go no matter what because I want to use my Ghost and it never fails.
 
i use aesus software for both partitions and copying hard drives, works great can even copy a hard drive i use by your os and it will be an exact clone :) ontop of that the stuff is free for home users! it aughta be able to get rid of that separate patition
i just missed your edit lol sorry.
but if your copying the hdd to the sdd then the aesus hdd clone software works great! and is SO EASY!
 
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i use aesus software for both partitions and copying hard drives, works great can even copy a hard drive i use by your os and it will be an exact clone :) ontop of that the stuff is free for home users! it aughta be able to get rid of that separate patition
i just missed your edit lol sorry.
but if your copying the hdd to the sdd then the aesus hdd clone software works great! and is SO EASY!

Yes, I had made the image using that software, I think. The problem came when I reimaged or tried to, it did not recognize that the hidden partition was different and it is what caused the partition table error. Without the hidden partition it would work fine but because the backup drive was bigger it slightly altered the partition's sizes.
 
Mr gov, If you want a legit version of acronis clone go to Intel and download their data migration software. It's a free version of acronis clone.

On edit: the Intel version has clone deactivated.
 
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