not enough free space in system reserved partition

Hey guys,

Sorry I dropped out for a few days -- I got a bit overwhelmed with some grad school stuff.

I apologize to AddRAM and anyone else for my attitude.

Anyway, just for the record, I investigated this log file thing a little more. See below:



As you can see, this log file is ~55 MB. Interesting? So that confirms what the OP of this thread experienced. I'm still curious about how/why this happened.

But I'm open to doing the method of simply moving the bootmgr via the program, as Greg suggested. I'll go for that next, and hopefully I can move beyond this. It's been a somewhat annoying time drain.

Okay, actually, another question. Why would the step of moving the bootmgr by itself solve my issue? The system reserved partition would still be too full. Wouldn't that still be a problem when I run Backup & Restore? (Which requires at least 50MB to be free on a partition less than 500MB) Apparently that problem went away for the OP (quoted below). But I'm confused about the details. If that bloated partition is still present on the drive being backed up, shouldn't the issue be encountered regardless?

acernetbook said:

Hi guys,

I did what whs said, which was enough to get windows to stop complaining about the dumb system reserved partition, and make an image backup. My understanding is that the system reserved partition is still there, but just not marked as active, so windows doesn't try to boot from there. As long as it is not active, I don't need care about the 100MB, and am happy not to bother with having to scoot the whole c: over, and having to run windows repair to fix it.

[...]

As for that bloated system reserved partition, my description of what is there in the first post is with those boxes unchecked. I also, while using gparted in a linux environment, ran the df and du commands on that partition, and saw the same files and same space consumption issues. e.g. du showed 14 MB of files (if I remember right), and df showed 90% usage. I can post the screenshot if you like, but what are you looking for beyond what I already said? I am still interested in figuring out what is taking up all the space.

As I wrote before I would delete System Reserved in Disk Mgmt after C is made System Active.

The whole point is that you're cutting it out.

The log file likely became corrupted. Did you use Win7 backup imaging?

whs said:

Yes, that would not change anything in the system reserved partition. But that partition would not be used (required) any more because from now on the system would boot from C where the bootmgr was copied to.

gregrocker said:

As I wrote before I would delete System Reserved in Disk Mgmt after C is made System Active.

The whole point is that you're cutting it out.

The log file likely became corrupted. Did you use Win7 backup imaging?

Thanks for clarifying. I guess I missed (or forgot) the part where you said to delete it. I just re-read your earlier post, and I see it now. Sorry about that. It sounded like the OP simply moved the bootmgr without actually deleting the partition. But whatever.

PS Sorry about the dumb question haha

It's not dumb at all. Some people don't delete it but I wouldn't want it around at all once you know C can boot itself. As soon as a Startup Repair is run Bootmgr could easily revert back to SysReserved.

As a rule of thumb you want no Primary partitions preceding the System Active partition lest there is a chance Startup Repair will move the Bootmgr there. This is an even more frequent problem we see here.

Alright, I am back in business! Deleted the 100MB partition, and now I can run Backup & Restore without problems again. Thank you so much, guys!


For anyone else out there who might be googling, some additional key phrases that could lead here:

There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy of the storage location (0x80780119)
files present on system reserved partition
invisible file filling system reserved partition
ntfs log file system reserved

Sure, moving the BCD and abandoning the recovery partition will work, but that's more avoiding the problem than solving it.



edit: had to fix the image url. Also, for the sake of searching: "chkdsk z: /l:2048" will fix it right up for you, OP.

I ran into the same issue as the OP after installing a Samsung SSD and using their included Data Migration tool. The logfile was responsible for taking up 50MB on the partition, but after resizing it with chkdsk I can now backup again.

Thanks, jdrobinson!