System Reserved

[LidenbokValour]

Hey guys,

So I turn on my PC today, the first time in about a week and for some reason Windows won't let me use my SSD.



BIOS is recognizing my SSD and so is Windows but it appears to be System Reserved? I have googled and googled but all I can find is people that get it after a fresh install of Windows.

Anyone ran into this before?

[Isiolia]

The "System Reserved" partition is completely normal for Windows versions after XP (it jump to 350MB with Windows 8). It holds the boot manager and related stuff.

[LidenbokValour]

Yeah, do know why it would change my SSD to that? without prompting? There was no windows files on it previously, just my games and shit. I can't access the disk at all now. System restore isn't changing anything either :/

[Isiolia]

It didn't change your SSD to that. You've got two drives showing up to the system there. One is your boot drive (120GB drive), and one is I'd assume an 8GB flash drive. The System Reserved partition is just a small slice of that 120GB drive.

This is what my machine looks like there:




My impression is that your SSD is not showing up to the system at all, either due to the drive dying or the cabling being bad. Even if it were unreadable, it'd show up in Disk Management as offline or unpartitioned.

[Niya]

To begin with, what drives do you have in your system? What's visible in your screenshot is a 120GB drive (SSD probably) and an 8GB one (USB stick?).
The "system reserved" partition is 100% normal for ANY system disk that has windows 7 upwards on it, as already stated it holds the bootloader and some emergency recovery stuff. And since it also holds the C partition, I'm 99% sure you installed Windows on that 120GB SSD. That 100MB partition gets auto-created during installation of windows and you can't (and shouldn't) change it.
My guess would be that you have a second disk/SSD in your PC that's not displayed anymore and that had most of your stuff on it. Check cabling, if that doesn't help you could try to plug it into another computer and see if it's recognized there. If not, your drive probably died.

[Ratatapa]

Hey guys,

So I turn on my PC today, the first time in about a week and for some reason Windows won't let me use my SSD.



BIOS is recognizing my SSD and so is Windows but it appears to be System Reserved? I have googled and googled but all I can find is people that get it after a fresh install of Windows.

Anyone ran into this before?

If you do a basic fresh install, Windows will always create it,

There's 2 way to remove it

A) During install when it ask where to install windows, you can create the partition and then delete the system reserve that is auto created before installing windows
B) Do this after windows is installed

1) Open a command prompt with administrator privileges (right click => run as administrator)

Type:

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

You should get a message similar to:

Boot files successfully created.

2) Open the Disk Management GUI (you could use diskpart for scripts), locate the C:\ partition right-click and select “Mark Partition as Active”, select yes to the “do you want to continue message”

3) Reboot to confirm that everything is ok.

4) In Disk Management you can now delete the 100Mb System Reserved partition by right clicking on it and selecting “Delete volume”

Optional

5) To re-claim the 100Mb you can use a partitioning tool such as partition magic or gparted

[Obsidian]

If I had to guess, the drive died or became otherwise detached.

[LidenbokValour]

Sorry for the delayed response, I appreciate everyones assistance thank you.

I've been busy all weekend so I've not been able to keep people in the loop. After I posted this thread, I rebooted after some updates and now I am getting "BOOTMGR MISSING" I have googled this error at work and it's pretty simple if a boot repair doesn't fix it then the hard drive is dead.

Simple enough right? ... nah I have been having issues getting hold of a valid ISO seeing as I don't have a product disk for my operating system which is W7 Ultimate. For some reason I did not save the email with the product key I bought last year and the product key retrieval software doesn't seem to be picking it up. I even bought a new one from a cheap website at this point I didn't know it was an OEM key so I just threw 20 quid at some Chinese company for a key that I can't use. I am borrowing a W7 Home disk from a friend so I am hoping it will just let me use the repair tool, if not I'm just going to fucking give up and buy a new hard drive. It only has my OS on there anyway so I wont lose anything.

BIOS seems to be picking up both my SSD and Hard drive so I am hoping that's a sign that it's fine and I just have a error. It's way harder for me to get my hands on an ISO more than anything so if anyone can hook me up, I would love you forever. I've already missed 2 raid lock outs! :<

[orinthia]

Can't direct link stuff to that here, I can send a PM though. Used to be able to download any version of windows 7 straight from microsoft through digitalriver without anything else, but those days are over so you have to get them another way. Those other ways are not without risk, but we know the hashes of the original untouched isos, so verifying authenticity isn't too hard. At least with the key you bought you might be able to get windows 10 for free (assuming it was legit, which they probably are but not retail keys).

For some reason I did not save the email with the product key I bought last year and the product key retrieval software doesn't seem to be picking it up.

Unless you don't use webmail, or foolishly have your email client delete upon retrieval, your email should be there but you need to type in the right kind of keywords to search for it. Since the system is no longer bootable, it'll be difficult to get its key without some boot disc. I would recommend hiren's boot disc to quickly access your comp, and it was a ton of utilities to get stuff. Assuming you can get into the pc, you can try belarc advisor http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html , it'll show you your windows key and a bunch of other innocuous stuff. With the key (assuming it is not an OEM key) you can get an iso from microsoft since they've now gated the download to those with retail, non-oem keys. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-recovery

[LidenbokValour]

Issue solved. Boot repair tool fixed the error. Can lock/delete thread.

Thank you everyone, I am really grateful for you all taking time out of your day to help me.