System reserved partition visible!

[ND22]

I have an older computer with vista installed and since 2 days ago the hidden recovery partition has become visible and I can’t hide it!! If I go to computer management and select change driver letter – remove for this partition I receive a warning message saying: “Windows cannot remove the drive letter of your volume. This may happen if your volume is a system or boot volume, or has page files.” Also if I try to change the drive letter I receive the same message with change instead of remove.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[bphlpt]

Going strictly by what you have posted, and ignoring for the moment how/why the hidden partition got un-hidden, have you looked to see whether Windows has indeed gone in and made a paging file on the partition like the error message says might have happened? If it has, you should be able to go into the System settings, tell Windows you don't want a paging file on that partition, reboot, delete the paging file, reboot, make sure that the paging file is gone, and then try again to remove the drive letter for that partition.

Cheers and Regards

[myselfidem]

If I well understand, you want remove the recovery partition on your computer?

If it's the case this can be done...But it's needed to use a CD. What is the manufacturer of your PC?

[Tripredacus]

Windows has indeed gone in and made a paging file on the partition like the error message says might have happened?

The System Reserved partition is a boot partition. Deleting it would require the user to change the BCD information or reinstall Windows, otherwise the OS would boot to "Bootmgr is missing" or a BCD black screen message.

However, the user also mentions recovery partition as well... I think it would be nice to find out which partition they are actually talking about.

Either way Windows won't let you modify the partition while booted into it. The best way would be to boot into a WinPE 2.0 and using diskpart to remove the drive letter.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Tripredacus

[ND22]

The system was a dual boot Vista/7 installed for testing purposes. Now I want to delete the partition with windows 7 on it in order to use the license on my new computer and to remain with vista only. When I deleted the partition with 7 the system reserved partition appeared with letter D and my D was renamed E and so forth.

[myselfidem]

Have you tried F8 on your keyboard and selected "Repair your computer"? Or using the CD previously created to use this option ?

http://support.micro...kb/927392/en-us

http://windows.micro...asked-questions

http://msdn.microsof...5(v=vs.85).aspx

I used EasyBCD but we must use this one carrefully!!

http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Edited May 3, 2013 by myselfidem

[Tripredacus]

In Disk Management, do you have 2 System Reserved partitions?

[ND22]

No, I have only one system reserved partition, the one created by Vista back in 2007!

Tried the above kb and no luck!!

[myselfidem]

You can create a Recovery Disk for Vista and use this one:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/141820-create-recovery-disc.html

[ND22]

I don’t know if this helps or not but the only error message I find every time the computer was booted on in event viewer is about MSE; here is the screenshot:

[myselfidem]

Maybe that can help you:

Event Log Performance