two system reserved partitions

whatfor · 29 Jun 2013

When I first had my desktop I had win 7 installed on a spinner. I then installed a SSD and installed the OS on that. I used disc cleanup to remove the old OS but I was left with the system reserved partition on the spinner. I tried to remove this partition using partition assistant but no go. So now I have two system reserve partitions and I think this may be messing with my backup software. How can I remove this unwanted partition.
Screenshot included of my disc management

bobafetthotmail · 30 Jun 2013

This tutorial. Note that you need to remove it from disk 0 (the spinner) and not disk 1 (the SSD), according to what I see in the image you posted.

Might or might not need a startup repair afterwards (step 9 of that tutorial). If it doesn't boot do a startup repair up to 3 times in a row (if it keeps not booting).

**Pauly** · 30 Jun 2013

Also those sys reserved partitions should not be assigned drive letters and should be hidden when you open my computer

gregrocker · 30 Jun 2013

This is what can happen if all other HD's are not unplugged during any install or repair. In this case Win7 is booting from the old HD as shown by the System flag on it's 100mb System Reserved partition.

To fix this unplug all other HD's to run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times until Win7 starts and the System flag is on the correct boot partition.

Then plug back in the other HD's making sure the SSD remains first to boot in BIOS setup, mark old System Reserved Inactive and then delete it in Disk Mgmt. Partition - Mark as Inactive

The correct way to uninstall an OS is always to delete its partition in Disk Mgmt, not run Disk Cleanup. You likely still have OS files on the old Win7 partition so I'd move the data off and delete both the old System Reserved and the old C partition, the repartition them Logical so that boot files cannot accidentally be written to them during any repair or reinstall, since having them in Disk0 position makes the situation vulnerable. I'd want Logical partitions only on the HD to guard against this. This may not be practical but since you didn't include the disk listings we can't see how full those partitions on Disk0 are.