Can’t Find System Reserved Partition? Fixed!

Accidentally deleted System Reserved Partition

Sometimes, users may accidentally delete the System Reserved partition when managing partitions in Disk Management and then can’t find the System Reserved partition. When the System Reserved partition is deleted or missing by accident in Windows 11/10/8/7, it may cause boot issues or system update issues on computers. For example, the "We couldn't update system reserved partition" error when installing Windows 11/10.

How to recover deleted System Reserved partition? You'll find useful solutions to recover the deleted or missing System Reserved partition and deal with boot errors on PC in this post.

What is System Reserved Partition?

Windows Installer creates a special System Reserved partition (SRP) on the MBR disk partition table when clean installing Windows 7/8/10. It appears before the system partition (normally the C: drive). It is a hidden NTFS file system partition without a drive letter. Therefore, you could only see it in Disk Management or partition manager tools.

The System Reserved partition first appears in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2. Users can’t find the System Reserved partition on the previous Windows OS version. It is 100MB in Windows 7/Windows Server 2008R2, 350 MB in Windows 8.1/Windows Server 2012 R2, and 500 MB in Windows 10/Windows Server 2016.

The System Reserved partition is of great importance for Windows booting. Because it stores the Boot Manager, Boot Configuration Data, BitLocker files, and Windows RE files. It means accidental deletion of the System Reserved partition could cause Windows won’t boot.

How to repair the Windows 10 System Reserved partition?

To repair Windows 10 System Reserved partition, you need a professional partition recovery tool to make a bootable media and then recover the deleted or missing System Reserved partition when accidentally deleted Windows boot partitions. There are many professional partition recovery software in the market, but AOMEI Partition Assistant stands out among them. AOMEI Partition Recovery Wizard, a built-in function of AOMEI Partition Assistant, could recover deleted or lost partitions in Windows 11/10/8/7.

With more than ten years of development, AOMEI Partition Assistant is a versatile tool in disk management. It offers basic partition management functions like creating partitions, resizing partitions, allocating space to other partitions, extending the NTFS system drive without rebooting, etc.

Moreover, there are some advanced functions to solve kinds of partition errors. You could convert MBR to GPT, dynamic partitions to basic partitions. Creating a bootable USB drive to make Windows boot normally.

To repair Windows 10 System Reserved partition, you need to download AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional demo first and make bootable media to recover the lost or missing System Reserved partition.

Phase 1. Create bootable media if Windows won’t boot

Step 1. Prepare a free USB drive and connect it to a healthy Windows computer, download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional on it. Click “Make Bootable Media” on the left panel of the main interface. Click “Next”.

Step 2. Select “USB Boot Device” when choosing the desired bootable media. And then click “Proceed” to start the making operation.

Step 3. Click “Yes” to confirm formatting the USB device and making the bootable media. When the process completes, the bootable media is ready to recover the deleted or missing System Reserved partition.

Phase 2. Recover System Reserved partition in WinPE mode

Step 1. Connect the bootable USB drive to the computer that can’t boot normally. Press F2, Del, or F1 keys to get into BIOS and change the BIOS boot priority and start the PC from the USB drive. The AOMEI Partition Assistant will start automatically when you log in.

Step 2. Click “Partition Recovery Wizard” on the left panel, and choose the hard drive which contains the deleted or missing System Reserved partition. Click “Next”.

Step 3. Choose a search mode. Try “Fast Search” for the first time, if it can’t find the deleted System Reserved partition, use “Full Search” again.

Step 4. After the search process completes, it will list the deleted or lost partitions in the hard disk. Select the System Reserved partition in the list and click “Proceed”. The partition recovery will be done in seconds and then the PC will boot normally.

Bonus tips: free up space on the System Reserved partition

Sometimes, when you are attempting to upgrade Windows 10/11, you may receive the error "We couldn't update the System Reserved partition" and the upgrade will fail. You’d better make backups when installing a new Windows OS or upgrading Windows via the free Windows backup tool-AOMEI Backupper.

This error may be caused by two main reasons. One is the System Reserved partition is full. According to Microsoft, some third-party anti-virus and security apps write to the System Reserved partition, potentially filling it up. The other is the file system of the system reserved partition is running in error.

How to solve Windows 10/11 that couldn’t be installed? You need to free up space on the System Reserved partition. Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant and follow the steps to extend System Reserved partition.

Step 1. Right-click on C: drive and select “Resize Partition”. Tick the option “I need to move this partition”, and then drag the slider bar from left to right. The unallocated space will be added to SRP. Click “OK”.

Step 2. Right-click on the system reserved partition and select "Resize Partition". Drag the slider bar to the right to extend SRP with the unallocated space. And then click “Apply” to execute the operation.