System Reserved partition size

BewilderedBob · 12 Jan 2018

The "System Reserved" partition on the only HD installed is labeled 'E:'; its size is only 31 MB resulting in a warning msg abt being too small. But when i check what can be removed from it only recycle bin appears but its size is ZERO. What is going on and how can it be corrected.

It is sandwiched between a large system recovery partition and 'C:' so may be suitable for expansion using disk mgmt but there is a concern that failure may destroy the only HD installed.

What can be SAFELY DONE to correct the small partition size ? Thanx.

Bewildered Bob

RESOLVED - using EaseUS (freebie) the "recovery" partition (provided by manufacturer without a drive ltr) was deleted and the "system reserved" ('E:') partition was expanded to 100 MB. All is well again. Thanx to those who provided guidance.

Megahertz07 · 18 Jan 2018

Can you take a Disk Management snapshot with snipping toll and post it here as an attachment?

torchwood · 18 Jan 2018

Hi Bob,

Thats not a standard setup - its custom

Normal setup

System reserved 100mb - NO drive letter
Then the rest (say 100gb) can all be C or split into 2 then you get C and E
(D will likely be system allocated to your DVD drive)

Its got a recycle bin as its got a drive letter

Roy

Megahertz07 · 19 Jan 2018

BewilderedBob said:

RESOLVED - using EaseUS (freebie) the "recovery" partition (provided by manufacturer without a drive ltr) was deleted and the "system reserved" ('E:') partition was expanded to 100 MB. All is well again. Thanx to those who provided guidance.

The recovery partition had a disk image to do a Factory recover. Unless you had done the recovery disks, that wasn't a good choice.

Alejandro85 · 27 Jan 2018

What kind of warning are you talking about? I've never seen that "system reserved" partition to have a drive letter unless explicitly given one, and even then it just contain the bootloader and nothing more.

Normally nothing is ever writen to that partition, as it's only used during boot. Moreover, unless you're using Bitlocker in the system drive, you don't even need it at all. Warnings about low free disk space in that partition are meaningless, as nothing will be writen there.

The recomended course of action would be simply to do nothing. At most, remove the drive letter from that partition. That's also completely safe as you requested.

Megahertz07 said:

The recovery partition had a disk image to do a Factory recover. Unless you had done the recovery disks, that wasn't a good choice.

I don't think it's a great loss anyway. He effectively lost the ability to do a "factory restore" but that's not a good idea. Normally, pre-built computers get installed all kind of stuff, wanted or not, and there are known cases where the retailers purposely installed malware into computers (and the respective "recovery" partitions). If the need arises, a clean install is a far superior alternative and he can use the newly available space for better purposes.