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Expand System Reserve Partition

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I'm planning to upgrade a win7 pc to win10. My preferred approach would be to clone the existing HD by backing up and restoring to a new HD, then perform the software upgrade on the new HD. However, my win7 System Reserved partition is only 100Mb, and I'd like to increase that to (say) 500Mb during the process. Is this possible with TI (currently on v 18, but happy to upgrade) ? All of the TI docs I've read seem to imply that you should not expand the System Reserved partition. I also have Acronis Disk Director, if that will help. Other partitioning tools imply that this is easily done. I'm sorry if this topic me up before; I couldn't find a reference to it.

PeteK

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Pete, do you currently have an issue with the MSR partition, i.e. low space on it?

If not, then I would recommend just attempting the upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 and see if it gives any warnings about the MSR size?

Note: you can still upgrade from 7 to 10 for free by using the Microsoft Media Creation tool and running the upgrade from the Win 7 Desktop.

Otherwise, the way to do the MSR size change would be to use a partition tool to shrink the size of the main C: OS partition and move the partition away from the MSR to create unallocated space to expand into.

See webpage: Fix for Low System Reserved Partition on MBR/GPT Disk in Windows 7/8/10

and webpage: What Is the System Reserved Partition and Can You Delete It?

for more information.

Steve,

Thanks for the suggestions and additional references.  I'll first clone the HD, then try meddling with the MSR partition.  If that doesn't work, I'll try a straight update.

Cheers,

 

PeteK

 

I thought I'd report back on progress.  Following Steve's advice, I created a disk image of my win7 HD and restored it to a new HD (disk clone).  I then tweaked the partition sizes using AOMEI Partition Assistant (free version) from a boot disk: reduced C: leaving unallocated space before the partition, increased the System Reserved partition using this unallocated space, than backed up the modified disk with Acronis (just to avoid having to do it again).  It worked like a charm!  However, it took me a while to work out that I needed to click on the chevrons (<< >>) in AEOMEI in order to choose where to create unallocated space when shrinking the C: partition.  So initially, the unallocated space was added to the wrong place.

So thanks again Steve, your advice was sounds as a bell.

Pete, glad to read that all has worked successfully, thanks for the feedback.