Recreate system reserved partition in Windows 7

You can boot into WinPE from your Windows 7 disk and create a partition from the installer, just reboot the machine after you have applied the settings. If you have another machine you can attach the drive to it and use diskpart or similar on it. If you don't then use a live CD that runs GParted (the GNU Partition Editor) or even the GParted live CD http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php.

Alternatively just don't bother with the system reserved partition as it's not strictly necessary anyway, although it could prevent you from recovering the system in the future if you can't run the Windows Recovery Environment from the DVD.

This tutorial explains how to do it rather easily:

Windows 7 - System Reserved : Create Using Disk Management

If you need to keep an existing install then that works very well but if you are going to blow the whole lot away by restoring an image then IMO that takes a lot of time to achieve something simple.

Thanks Endjinn,

I am trying diskpart but get a BCD error at restart:

1 boot from a WinPE usb stick
2 use diskpart to
- clean the drive,
- create a 100MB primary  NTFS active partition, assign letter=S
- create a primary ntfs partition, assign letter=W
3. Copy the bootmgr and the boot folder from an existing working 100mb partition
4 Use imagex to apply the wim to W:
reboot

error - can't access bcd?

I prefer using diskpart/imagex, as it both are freely available Windows tools and are easy to script into a .cmd batch file.

Where am I going wrong?

Thanks!




Do I need to copy bootmr file and bootm

Bcedit was what I needed to add to the mix. And the MS link was really useful, as it pointed out the h,s and r attrib on the BCD fille.

Thanks!

sorry, I meant bootrec, not bcedit

Cheers!