Knowledge Base

It is important to back up and restore Windows 7 System Reserved partition along with system partition

This article applies to:

• Acronis True Image Home 2010
• Acronis True Image Home 2011
• Acronis True Image Home 2012

Introduction

Windows 7 may have a special hidden System Reserved Partition of 100 MB, which contains boot files and is used for BitLocker encryption. This partition can be viewed in Windows Disk Management (Start-Run -> diskmgmnt.msc):

Solution

The following points should be taken into consideration when using Acronis True Image Home on Windows 7 with System Reserved partition:

Backup

When creating a backup of your entire system disk or your system partition, make sure to select System Reserved partition. This partition is necessary  to recover the system from a crash:

(!) If you create a backup with Back up my critical data wizard or with Use backup assistant, System Reserved partition is selected automatically.

(!) If you back up non-system data only, or a disk or partition with non-system data (e.g. photos, movies, documents etc), you do not need to include the System Reserved partition in the backup.

Recovery

1. In general, System Reserved partition should be selected when restoring system disk:

Acronis True Image Home 2012 in Windows	Under Acronis Bootable Media

2. System Reserved partition is Primary and Active. These options should be selected when recovering System Reserved partition:

Acronis True Image Home 2012 in Windows	Under Acronis Bootable media

3. When restoring the system to a disk of different capacity, it is not recommended to resize System Reserved partition, as this may make the system unbootable.

More information

See also:

• Acronis True Image Home 2011: Disk and partition backup
• Restoring Windows 7 VHD Backup Files with Acronis True Image Home