I installed Windows 8 dual booting with windows 7. I followed easyBCD method to solve installation issue.
Now everything is fine except the system reserve itself is running low on disk space.
What should I do?
What's the total capacity and the occupied space of the System Reserved partition on your PC?
Why is it a problem?
Its 100mb. Actually I was unable to install Windows 8 because the system reserved was too small for it. Then from the suggestion of few members, I followed this
Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD
which magically solved the issue.
But now I am running low in space.
You should do nothing. You only use that system reserve space to boot into Windows 7, you never save anything there and it doesn't start filling up with data because nothing should be writing to it. It's usually only present on default installations of Windows 7 and many people delete it upon reinstallation of the system as it's rather unnecessary to split the boot manager from the main partition/drive. When you attempted to install Windows 8, it probably tried to load the boot manager onto that same partition, causing some more space to be lost on an already small partition.
The system reserved partition contains the Windows Recovery Environment, among other things. I personally wouldn't call it unnecessary. I extended the 100 MB system reserved that windows 7 setup to 200 MB when I setup my dual boot with Windows 8 RP. The last time I tried to setup a dual boot with Windows 8 I got that same not enough free space message. Right now disk management is showing 166 MB free so I have no idea why 100 MB wasn't enough?
You can make a recovery disk within Windows that doesn't take up any hard drive space or require a separate partition and is thus less subject to corruption. I suppose some people find not having to use a separate disc for repair more convenient, so that could be something useful it does provide. It does also hold the partition space for BitLocker encryption if you use that, but you can also just create a partition for this at the time you start using it. So, the usefulness of that partition is beyond my purposes and seems to cause more problems than it solves with people multi-booting that don't know how to handle such a partition.
I agree, it seems to cause problems with dual booting to Windows 8. I just wanted to point out that it does have a purpose and wasn't something Microsoft did just for the fun of it.
Right, I don't think it's inherently a terrible idea, rather terrible execution. I think they tried to combine too many disparate and critical things into one secluded partition on the system that gets little to no attention until something goes wrong. Cramming 3 critical services (boot mgr, recovery, and encryption) into one partition pretty much violates all logical reason of why you implement partitions (and ideally separate drives) in a system. Getting rid of it and implementing recovery and encryption partitions on your own seems way more secure and logical to me, not to mention way less complicated.
To each his own. I for the most part just leave it alone and hope I never need it.
Considering the system reserve 100mb space is still the same, then why in the first place Windows 8 refuses to install?
Some member says, using the EasyBCD method just copies the system reserved file as a backup to drive c. So, I would assume that the file are still there intact in that 100mb space. So, how Window8 was installed.
A question here, is it possible to expand the partition of SR to something like 300mb at fresh installation. And if I avoid or delete the partition totally by using some backup method, will there be problems in future??
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