System Reserved drive Inaccessible.

[Brds7t7]

Hi all, just wondered if anyone could help me with this?

I have a 300mb System Reserved partition. Today when I went into disk management I noticed the partition has disappeared. When I click on it and click properties it says it's an unlabelled volume. It was showing up fine a few days ago.


Now the disk shows up ok in other programs like easeus partition master and paragon hard disk manager just not windows disk management. Tried to do a chkdsk on it and it says it can't access the drive.

Now if I assign it a drive letter it works ok again. Then if I remove the drive letter and reboot my pc it's inaccessible again. Windows still boots though.

Enclosed a couple of screenshots. Wondered if anyone can help me with this please?

 

[wanchoo]

The hard disk image appears quite OK to me. The System Reserved Drive is usually without a Drive Letter and inaccessible. Why do you want to access it?

 

[Brds7t7]

This is how it looked before even when not assigned a drive letter:





As you can see, it showing the correct free space and label. And was accessible. Now it just isn't accessible and reports that there is no free or used space, it doesn't even show the NTFS file system.

This is how it looks now:

 

[whs]

You should really not muck around with the System reserved partition. Next you know, you will not be able to boot any more.

I suggest you move the bootmgr to C:\. Then you can play around with it - even delete it.

 

[Brds7t7]

I haven't really done anything to it though. Other than extending it to get over system image backup problems. But I did that about a year ago and never had a problem til two days ago.

I'd rather keep it to be honest as I prefer to be able to boot into the Windows recovery tools without having to keep going through my DVD's.

 

[Brds7t7]

Anyone got anymore thoughts on this issue? The drive is ok as long as it's assigned a drive letter. As soon as I remove the drive letter and reboot the drive is inaccessible again.
I did a check with Paragon Hard disk Manager and it says it has minor errors. Chkdsk finds no issues though.

 

[whs]

Have a look whether this little tut can be of any help: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/150576-partitions-view-hidden-partitions.html

 

[gregrocker]

You'd still be able to boot the Repair Console on F8 Advanced Boot Tools menu if you move the System boot files to C. WinRE is onboard C.

What I would do is use the best partition manager for Win7, free Partition Wizard bootable CD, to check the File System on each partition. Errors may be causing the anomaly. If not then unless it presents performance problems I would leave it alone unless you want to move the System boot files to C, perhaps even reclaim the HD space into C.

 

[Brds7t7]

Hi Greg, I'm considering moving boot to C: then deleting system reserved and moving c drive to the left. The only thing I'm concerned about is if I move it to the left and then my C: drive becomes inaccessible?
I noticed this started happening a little while after I extended my system reserved partition. Maybe that screwed things up?

Could it be a MBR problem or anything to do with partitions not being aligned properly?
I use a RAID 0 configuration and I've heard that it can cause issues if the partitions aren't aligned correctly.

 

[gregrocker]

Since you need the PW CD to do the changeover anyway, try Checking the File System first as that may solve it.

If not, rightclick on C to Mark Active, click OK. Then click on the HD # to highlight HD, from Disk tab select Rebuild MBR, Apply both steps. This may preclude the need to run Startup Repairs.

If Win7 wont' boot at restart, then boot into WIn7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD to run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times.

Once Win7 starts and holds the System Active flags, boot back into PW CD to delete SysReserved and Resize Win7 partition into its space.

 

[Brds7t7]

OK thanks Gregrocker, I'll do it later and let you know the outcome. Would have preferred to keep the System Reserved but it seems to have caused more issues. Why MS didn't just make it 200mb in the first place is a mystery?
Would have saved people a lot of problems.

 

[Brds7t7]

I've tried booting into the PWCD unfortunately my options are limited as it's not picking up my RAID 0 configuration. It shows it as two separate hard disks.
The only option I had was to do a surface test which found no errors.

 

[gregrocker]

Why are you using RAID0 for the OS drive? Win7 doesn't much like RAID. It offers no benefit that I know of and lots of problems in Win7.

I would unRAID and clean reinstall to only one HD with other unplugged.

 

[Brds7t7]

When I got the pc from Dell it came set up as RAID so I just left it as it was.

Do you know of any imaging software than can migrate from Raid to Non-Raid without reinstalling everything?

 

[gregrocker]

We'll have to wait to hear from the imaging experts to know for sure. I believe I read recently where someone reimaged RAID to a single HD.

You could always get the superior Clean Reinstall Windows 7 Factory OEM without the preinstalled bloatware and useless factory utilities which have better versions built into Win7. This is often better than getting a new computer.

Are there any performance problems associated with this anomaly?

 

[Brds7t7]

No, to be honest Greg its been working fine. The only thing it effects is when I go to create a system image and system reserved drive doesn't show up. If I then assign a drive letter and remove it again straight away the image works OK again.

What I might do is mark C as active, do he system repair 3 times, format system reserved area then recreate it. Then mark system reserved as active again and do startup repair again to recreate the system reserved partition. If after that the drive still is inaccessible I'll just delete it.

Been reading a few items that say you can use Windows system image backup to go from Raid 0 to non raid. But I'm going to leave that until I've got a bigger hard drive. At the moment I have 2 320gb drives but I want to buy a single 2tb drive in next few months.

 

[whs]

You can also copy the bootmgr to C:\ http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/209885-bootmgr-move-c-easybcd.html

I see no reason why you cannot make an image of a raid0 drive. Try free Macrium.

 

[Brds7t7]

Wow thanks whs. Completely missed that feature in EasyBCD! Makes it a lot easier.

I can make the images ok but I can't read the Raid0 using the Partition Wizard disk. Just shows it as two separate drives.

Once I've bought the new single drive I'm going to delete the Raid array and just use one of the drives as extra internal storage.

 

[whs]

Looks like a good plan. And if you want OS performance, get a 64GB SSD. That is a LOT better than Raid0 which really does not buy you much for the OS - different though for shoving large amounts of sequential data around. But the OS does not do that. It's performance if a function of the access time to the disk. And it is hard to beat the 0.1ms average access time to a SSD - spinning disks (Raid or not) are around 15ms.

 

[Brds7t7]

I've been looking at SSD's. Could I use an SSD for Windows 7 and a 2TB Spinner for Data storage?