This drive does not have enough space to store a system image.

I'm using Windows 7 x64 SP1 and I'm having problems with Windows Backup. Windows keeps telling me my backup failed because I don't have enough space. My system drive C: is 128GB total, 90GB used. In Windows Backup I see this:

This drive does not have enough space to store a system image.
When I click 'More information' it says I need 1.51 TB of space for a system image.

I have 364GB free on the drive I am backing up to (call it drive D). 1.5TB is larger than entire drive D. This problem only occurred after one of my media drives recently failed (call it drive M) and I replaced it with a new drive. When I choose 'Change settings' I can see it is checked to 'Include a system image of drives System Reserved, Media (M:), (C:) BUT the media drive is not checked in the tree of files to backup (and it shouldn't be).

So I don't know how or why it happened but for some reason it wants to include my media drive now in the backup. The media drive should NOT be backed up. There is no way I can find to remove it from being included on the list of 'Include a system image of drives'. System restore is disabled for both drives D and M.

Any ideas? Thanks

Windows Backup has its own possibly peculiar ideas of what to include in a backup.

Post a screen shot of Windows Disk Management showing all drives.

ignatzatsonic said:

Windows Backup has its own possibly peculiar ideas of what to include in a backup.

Post a screen shot of Windows Disk Management showing all drives.

Yeah it looks like it. I tried to create a new backup configuration and it would not let me unselect the media drive.

I cannot post the screenshot of the diskmgmt.msc because it contains confidential information in the drive labels. I can tell you that the M drive is a primary partition of 1.4TB on a 3TB GPT physical drive. It is not listed as System/Active, or Boot or anything. My 128GB SSD has a System partition that's 100MB and a main Boot partition that's 120GB. Hope that helps.

I wrote that this problem was solved but actually it is unsolved still so I've edited this post.

Well I've finally solved this problem. What is happening is if there are any services on a drive then Windows makes it part of the system image. My Media (M:) drive had a service installed on it. The only way I could find to stop this from happening is make sure there are no services on the drive, even if they are disabled. I deleted the service running on drive M (sc delete <name>). Once I did that I was able to backup.

I found the answer from Dazza1967 at technet forums in this thread:
Windows 7 Backup - System image includes non system disk

You can get a list of service commands by running wmic service GET PathName