Easy way to fix system reserved partition on wrong drive

When the system reserved partition and the system partition are not on the same disk, you will encounter the system reserved partition problem on the wrong drive.

After installing a new Windows operating system, a special disk partition called the System Reserve partition is created. These partitions are only visible in the disk management utility because they do not have any drive letters.

This special partition contains boot configuration data, boot manager, Windows recovery environment and some space for boot files.

These files are critical to the functionality of BitLocker Drive Encryption. This partition should be on the same disk as the system partition (usually the C: drive).

But when two partitions are not on the same disk, it means you have Windows operating system installed on a PC with multiple hard drives.

The good news is that you can move the system reserved partition to another drive. Read on to learn how to do this.

How to move the system reserved partition to another drive?

Using the Disk Management Utility

1. Navigate to Start on the taskbar, right-click and select Run to open the Run console.
2. In the search field, type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter to launch the Disk Management tool.
3. Now, find the disk where you want to place the system reserved partition.
4. Here, look for the block name Unallocated or Free space. Right-click on it and select New Simple Volume.
5. If you don't find any unallocated/free space, you can create one. To do this, you can go to any existing empty/unused drive/partition, right-click and select Delete Volume.
6. Alternatively, you can right-click this existing partition and select Shrink Volume.
7. In the Shrink dialog box, go to Enter the amount of space you want to shrink in the MB field and type the volume you want to shrink, and then press Shrink.
8. When finished, right-click this free space and select New Simple Volume.
9. It will open the New Simple Volume Wizard. Press Next to continue.
10. Follow the on-screen instructions to specify the volume size, assign a drive letter, and format the partition.
11. Assign a drive letter to the old reserved system partition so that it appears in File Explorer.
12. Move the Boot folder, bootmgr and BOOTSECT.BAK from the old partition to the new partition.
13. Now, go to the new system reserved partition and delete the drive letter.
14. Next, right-click on the new reserved partition and select Mark Partition as Active.
15. Once completed, restart your PC and check if it boots normally. If so, you can now delete the raw partition.
16. But if the system cannot start, please use the system repair disk to perform startup repair.

If you are impatient with using this built-in Windows utility or are worried about doing something wrong, you can use dedicated disk partition management software.

It will help you skip some of the above steps and let you safely transfer the system partition to a different drive in just a few clicks. It has been proven to work well with no risk of data loss.

Tenorshare Free Partition Manager automates most of the process and includes other convenient features to help you create, clone, split, format and resize partitions.

Creating a clone of the system reserved partition in the system disk and then deleting the old partition can help solve the problem.

Since the reserved partition contains system startup files, in order to prevent operation errors or other situations, please make a system repair disk first.

Tip For Windows 10 and Windows 11, the size of the reserved partition is 500 MB. You can rename the new partition to system reserved when formatting.

While the system reserved partition on the wrong drive is a common problem, we recommend not deleting the original reserved partition as it can cause further confusion.

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