It is not really the OS drive size that is a limit provideed you do not have lots of applications. It is data that inexorably grows.
These days 128 GB is pretty much at low end of needs but with careful management e.g. regular cleanup of unwanted stuff, clean up of old system files, temporary files etc., it is manageable.
However, you really need a second drive for data.
It might be that. Check how much free space is in it.I don't have control over the system reserved partition which is around 100MB.
The system drive is 89GB free out of 119GB reported by Explorer.
The data drive, which I'm backing up to, 178GB free out of 232GB.
This is a system that does nothing but run IIS and serve web pages. So the entire OS is 32.5GB used, total.
How much free space is on the 100mb partition? It needs at least 50 megabytes of free space.
If there is less than 50mb free you could delete something from it that is not needed.
Or you could extend the 100mb partition.
Or ( if it is an mbr disk) you could make the boot partition both system and boot so the 100mb is no longer used.
You can check with any free 3rd party partition manager. I suggest diskgenius
https://www.diskgenius.com/download.php
I had to open Disc Management to see that drive. But what I discovered was that it's 49.9MB and 30.3MB used, 19.6MB free.
So when system image backup is running, you say it needs to write to that tiny partition? I thought that only contained a boot environment for recovery purposes.
If that's the problem, can I make it larger? I would have to shrink the 119GB partition first (contains the OS) to make room to expand this partition.
You could expand it . Depending where it is, you probably need to use 3rd party partition manager to do that.can I make it larger? I would have to shrink the 119GB partition first (contains the OS) to make room to expand this partition.
If your disk is mbr, you could instead make the os partition both system and boot, thereby making the tiny partition redundant.
If you post a screenshot of disk managament window, that would help.
Here's a screen shot of the disk manager, showing the drives.
What I don't understand is why image backup would be writing to the drive it's backing up. It should only be writing to the backup drive.
You can mark your os partition active.
Then run bcdboot c:\windows.
from admin cmd prompt:
diskpart
sel vol c
act
exi
bcdboot c:\windows
In folder options, or whatever they call it now, set hidden files and folders showing >apply>ok
Then have a look on your os partition (c) and you should see the folder called boot.
Reboot the pc and in disk mgmt you will see the os partition (c) is labelled system, active, boot
It has been a while since I used mbr disks for the os.
I don't know if it was marking the partition active, or all the other command line stuff, but the result is that I was able to successfully run Windows Image Backup after executing those commands. Thank you!
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