Windows 7: Going Crazy with Neighbor's Computer - System Image

Ugh. For the last 7 hours I've been dealing with the neighbor's computer.



The original problem was their hard drive was failing, causing everything to run very slowly. Today I installed a new hard drive and reinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium x64. The installation went fine. After setting up their profiles and making sure it was up-to-date I proceeded to create a system image so they could load that instead of having to reinstall in the future.

Their external hard drive is some annoying ClickFree C2 or something. It was temperamental just trying to get it to show up. I hate removable hard drives with auto-backup programs, I prefer a normal removable hard drive. After getting it to work right I saved a system image to it. However I had renamed the WindowsImageBackup folder to something else. This was a problem because I found out there were a couple things I had wanted to do before making that image. So I went to restore that image and it said there were no images found. I thought it was a problem with drivers but it turns out the folder must be renamed to WindowsImageBackup before restoring.

After restoring the image I activated Windows which was one of the things I had wanted to do. After that I tried to create a system image again. However, it gave me an error saying there wasn't enough room for the shadow volume copy , 0x80780119 I believe. However, the image should only take a measly 17GB since it is a new installation, and there is over 700GB of free space on the external HDD!

I've searched online trying to find a solution and can't. Please help!

Are You using Win 7 backup? I mean the one that came with Win 7. If you are, (I know this doesn't match the error message you posted but it is worth looking at) Look at the permissions on the directory you are backing up to. Take ownership and add the account you are operating from with full pemissions. Might work. I have seen that work before. In the meantime dl Macrium v 5 free. You will like it much better.

Yes, Windows 7 backup. I've backed up my computer for months now without incident. And I have heard of Macrium Reflect free, but I would prefer the built-in Windows backup be used in case that product every stops being supported/made, and other reasons.

I think your system reserved partition may be the culprit, there are quite a few threads with windows reporting

not enough space because you need to have at least 40mb free in system reserved partition.

Can you post a screenshot of your disk management window like this,



Here's a similar thread Remove System Reserved Partition+Partition Wizard

He ended up making the system reserved a little bigger and it solved his problem.

Yes their reserved partition only has 36MB left on it. It can't be extended though... and how did it get to only 36MB? I selected to format the HDD before restoring the image on it?

It can be extended, have a look at this thread,

Remove System Reserved Partition+Partition Wizard

They were successful in walking him through extending it and solving his problem.

I'll try deleting the journals first since that seems the easiest.

Afterwards I think I would try deleting the system reserved and putting it into the primary partition.

Why does it make a separate partition if it can be part of the primary partition?

Also, what are the exact steps for doing that? The links were a little complex.

Well I tried removing the journals. That freed up a tiny bit but not enough. Then I tried deleting the reserved partition and running the startup repair to fix it. The first time I forgot a step and it put the boot info back onto the 100MB blank space. I did it again and it worked. However there was a blank 100MB chunk of space before the primary partition. I used Partition Wizard to try and add the space to the primary partition but it couldn't get all of it; it refused to get a final 8MB chunk. I figured that was good enough, but then that had damaged something and the boot loader couldn't find an OS at all.

After that I just decided to reinstall Windows. However, it put the boot info into the primary partition, but that 100MB of blank space was still there. For some reason it hadn't let me remove it when I formatted the drive during the Windows installation. I just decided to leave it considering what had happened last time.

After the install I activated Windows again without incident which surprised me since that key had been used to activate it yesterday. I successfully created an image for them, reinstalled their apps and files, and it is now running much faster that with the failing hard drive.

However, I would like to know how to prevent the system reserved partition from not having enough space in the future. My PC has 70MB free.

When you carry out a clean install of Windows it will prompt you that it wants to create a system reserved partition of 100 MB.

Once that has been done you can always delete the partition you created for the Windows installation, extend the 100 MB partition to the size you want (200-300 MB should be ample), and then create a new partition for Windows.