I recently installed Windows on an old Dell tower I was trying to repurpose, and observed a seemingly stupid behavior that I’ve noticed before. The tower had a small SSD and a larger hard drive. The SSD was selected as the install target, but the installer still put a ‘system reserved’ partition on the hard drive.
If I’m not mistaken, the consequence of this is that if the hard drive is ever removed, Windows will be unbootable. This is unfortunate since I may want to upgrade that small, old HD at some point. Why on Earth did the installer do it? Just the usual M$ stupidity, or is there a good reason for it?
Well spotted!
I’ve been bitten by that before.
But it was only a while after the install had been up and running, and was a little annoying to unplug all but boot drive and re-install.
As for Why? There is probably a reason, but I’ve not seen any reasonable explanation for it.
Nope. BIOS/MBR install. This is an old system, but still decently powerful by modern standards (dual Xeon workstation.) I’ll try disabling the HD in the BIOS, but I’m not hopeful.
Bah, then it holds BCD and bootloader itself.
Do you know how to recover botloader?
If yes, then again disable HDD, it will stop booting.
Boot from USB and rebulid boot record and bcd.
Here you have pretty detailed instructions:
After that your BCD should be on your system drive instead this small System Reserved
Thanks, this mostly worked. But a few additional steps were necessary.
After running bootrec /fixmbr, the other commands failed with “Element not found.” I then had to run bootrec /nt60 ALL. This allowed me to run /rebuildbcd, but /fixboot still failed.
So then I had to run DISKPART and mark the “C:” partition as active. Then I started getting “Access Denied” messages. Sigh. Finally, I went back to Windows Recovery and tried the "Repair Boot ", which almost always fails. But this time it worked.
A lot of effort, but my SSD is now unshackled from spinning rust. Thanks!
Yeah bootrec is sometimes flaky. There is another tool that usually gives better results (I believe auto repair uses it), but I forgot its name atm, because I’m not using Windoze daily for like 2 years already.
Glad it did work.
Time for a bit of necromancy. This problem bit me again, somehow. I tried to install a Windows update which failed. The error code reported indicated that the ‘system reserved’ partition was out of space.
I fired up Disk Manager and took a look at hard drives. Sure enough, somehow the SSD had no system reserved partition at all, and the hard drive had a measly 50MB system reserved partition. I think however I found an easier solution which I will record here for posterity (and myself.)
The following command didn’t create a seperate system reserved partition, but instead took the existing ‘boot partition’, installed the appropriate boot files, and added the ‘system reserved’ property to the volume:
bcdboot C:\Windows /s C: (from an administrative command prompt)
So now the SSD appears like so (I’ve since upgraded it to a 1TB SATA SSD):
I did have to use GParted to set the ‘boot’ flag on the Windows SSD, but after that it booted perfectly and I was able to install the update.
