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Firstly, quick background. I have Win7 x64 Pro. The reason I wanted to resize my system reserved partition is this: http://www.pagestart.com/win7br0x8100003301.html The Backup & Restore stopped working because my system reserved partition became too full. (I don't know how or why.) The above link explains that the system reserve partition needs to be made larger.

Okay, so I resized it from 100MB --> 500MB. In the above tutorial it says, "After Partition Wizard has completed the changes, your computer will boot to Windows." ... Hahaha, no. No it won't. Instead, I get this error:

boot error


Things I have tried:

  1. Tried using both Partition Wizard as well as GParted, booted from a CD. I used Hiren's Boot CD for both.

  2. According to this how-to-geek article, this error is actually expected after resizing the system reserved partition. It says to use the automatic "Repair" option in the Win PE environment. I used my Win 7 Repair Disc to initiate the automatic "Startup Repair." I tried this at least 3 times, as people on forums suggested. Did not work.

  3. I followed this procedure, outlining command-line options to use in bootrec.exe.

how to access command prompt

I tried the proposed steps in order. First step: bootrec.exe /FixMbr This returned "operation completed successfully." Restarted, same boot error. Next step: bootrec.exe /FixBoot It returned "Element not found." See photo below:

bootrec.exe photo


So, now what? I also tried fiddling around with some MBR-related utilities contained on Hiren's Boot CD, to no avail. Why is this not working, and how do I make it work? Why is bootrec.exe not even detecting my Win installation? I am out of ideas/options...

My drive is a Samsung 840 Evo, 250GB, if that's relevant.

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    First question - is your system reserved partition still active. Please check with Partition Wizard. If yes, rebuild the MBR, also with PW. If no, activate it and see whether it boots or retry the startup/repair 3 times.
    – whs
    Mar 28, 2015 at 19:58
  • Thank you for your suggestion! Yes, the partition was active. I did the rebuild MBR operation with PW (v 7.6.1); it completed very quickly, took like a second. Didn't work -- still the same boot error when I restarted.
    – StormRyder
    Mar 28, 2015 at 22:17
  • Can you post a readable picture of what you see in PW. Somehow you lost the bootmgr. In principle the 3x startup/repair should rebuild it, but apparently it didn't.
    – whs
    Mar 28, 2015 at 23:03
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    Hmm, I think I see what happened. You gave the system reserved a drive letter with PW. That may have corrupted the system reserved partition. That has happened to me before, but on an EFI partition. There could of course also be something else corrupted. Did you make an image of those partitions before you manipulated them ? I understand why you left the unallocated space - for wear leveling they recommend underprovisioning. But that is not really necessary.
    – whs
    Mar 29, 2015 at 19:38
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    Try to open it once and see what's inside. If you can't get at it with Windows, use a live Linux CD.
    – whs
    Mar 30, 2015 at 1:32

1 Answer 1

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What I did was use gparted to extend the System reserved partition D:. I had to move my C partition over to give it space.

Then I couldn't get it to boot. So I used this https://www.boyans.net/RepairWindows/repair-windows-boot.html

Following commands will re/create BCD on system drive which is mapped to drive N: (change drive letter to reflect your mappings)

bootsect /nt60 N: /force /mbr - rewrite Windows 7/8/10 boot records to system partition and MBR.

attrib -s -h N:\boot\bcd - remove system and hidden attributes of BCD file so it can be deleted. See Note below.

del N:\boot\bcd - delete BCD. See Note below.

Bcdboot c:\windows /s N: - re/create BCD assuming your latest Windows version is installed on drive C:

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