Back up failed to complete

The 100mb is the System Reserved partition. It holds the Boot Manager code and the Boot Configuration Database. If it is too small, or doesn't have enough free space, Windows backup will not work. To post a picture of Disk Management

Start> In search box type Computer management> Enter> On left side click on Disk Management> Post a screen shot of that for Greg (or another) to look at. I will post an example of mine, but don't be concerned that mine does not show the SR partition, as I don't have one



A Guy

I'm going to let Greg deal with this. Looks like your Disk 1 is marked as active, and not your disk 0 (C:\). And I'm not sure why that is. Greg will be able to tell you what's up there

A Guy

You have five empty partitions on two Hard drives which appear to have no content or drive letter so that they can even be accessed. Do you know how you got these?

Go to Control Panel>Folder Options>View and unhide Hidden and System files. Then in Disk Mgmt rightclick on each unlettered partition to Change Drive Letter, click Add, then give each partition a drive letter long enough to rightclick>Explore its content to see if there's anything on it. If so post back a screenshot.

Thanks for the reply Gregrocker. I made the partitions on the drives for use with Linux. On the same drive as the NTFS partition there is a swap partition, 2gb, and the rest are ext4 partitions except for the 10mb free at the end of the line.
On the second drive there are 2 ext 4 partitions and the rest is unallocated. The last is the Samsung 2 tb drive where I want to put the back up.
I am confused by your reference to Sony, as, to my knowledge there are no Sony parts in this particular rig. I do have a Sony Vaio laptop though.
The reason I want to put the back up on the 2 tb disk is so I can do a clean reinstallation of win 7. I want to format the 2 drives and put win 7 on the smaller of the 2 disks by it's self and use the other drive for messing about with linux. I have a win 7 disk I bought at a local computer shop and that is what I will be doing the clean installation with.
My daughter is working on my machine doing a school assignment, so I am unable to give further info or screen shots. I will do that when she has finished. Thanks again, James.

I see now you posted different specs in the OP. What jumps out reading them is AVG bloatware in services. I'd replace it with Microsoft Security Essentials to see if problems go away. There is even an AVG Removal tool which the most bloated AV's require since they are like a bad infection: Download AVG 2012 Removal Tool

It's indeed smartest to put the OS's on separate HD's booted via the BIOS boot order or one-time BIOS Boot Menu key. Be sure to unplug the other HD when you're installing or reimaging.

If dumping AVG doesn't solve your prob I would clean reinstall Win7 to be sure the backup and everything else functions correctly since you already have problems which cannot be assumed to be as a result of the Dual Boot.

If you follow these same steps to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 deleting all partitions on the target HD with the other unplugged you'll be assured of getting a perfect reinstall. Then after setup capture an image so you never have to reinstall again.