2nd Installed Harddrive identified by Windows 7 as "System Reserved"

2nd Installed Harddrive identified by Windows 7 as "System Reserved"

I purchased a new 1TB harddrive to host Windows 7. The installation was without any problem. Prior to installation, I removed all harddrives, including another 1TB data backup harddrive.

When I installed the second drive, with all my important backed up data, it comes identified by Windows 7 as drive D: System Reserved. There are no contents despite the properties indicating about 40% used space. Where did my data go? Please tell me it's not lost!! How can I get access to this drive??

Jenn



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I'm assuming the old hard drive still has W7 installed on it?

If so the issue is that the old hard drive still has a Active partition on it. You should not have 2 Active partitions on one system, and that will caused these kinds of problems.

You can use a third party tool like Partition Wizard for bootable CD to remove the active flag from the old hard drive,
Free Partition Magic alternative, partition manager freeware, partition magic server, partition magic Windows 7 and free Partition Manager software for Windows 7/8/VISTA/XP/2000 and Windows Server 2003/2008/2000.

or you can use Diskpart
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/197157-partition-mark-inactive.html

Just to simplify things and avoid any problems you should disconnect all unnecessary drives while running Diskpart. You need to be able to select the correct drive from it's properties or partition sizes because normal drive identification will not be available.

could you post a slightly bigger screenshot? I have major issues trying to read text in that image.

"system reserved" normally doesn't have a drive letter. But what your looking for is on E or F.
system reserved on disk 0 (called D) can be deleted anyway!