Moving "system reserved" partition

[Essence_of_War]

I made a mistake when I installed windows 7 ultimate ~ 2 years ago, I left my HDD along with my SSD, and since I had pre-formatted the SSD with a spot for windows and a spot for ubuntu, and I had not allocated any space on the HDD, windows put its system reserved partition on the first unallocated spot it could find, on the HDD.

As a result, my two drives look something like this:

SSD (w/ GRUB installed to the MBR):
Windows OS ~ 200 GB
Ubuntu ~ 30 GB

HDD :
System Reserved ~100 MB
NTFS Storage ~ 2 TB

GRUB's entry for windows points to the boot manager on the system reserved partition, and since I do regular image backups of my SSD, I'd really like to move the system reserved partition to the SSD so that my image backups will be fully bootable.

Is there any easy way to do this? I think EasyBCD will let me move the boot files/ boot manager, but I'd rather just move the whole partition if possible so that if I wanted to use bitlocker or use the advanced boot options I could do that.

 

[Essence_of_War]

For anyone who cares, I fixed all of this this afternoon, and I wanted to leave a few notes in case this is helpful for anyone else.

So here's basically what I did:

The cast of characters:
samsung 840 non-pro-non-evo: sda with an ntfs windows installation (sda1) and an ext4 linux installation (sda2)

2TB seagate: sdb, with an ntfs system reserved partition (sdb1) and an ntfs data drive.

4tb seagate (the new drive): sdc

1) Popped sdc into my external dock, gave it a GPT, and made two partitions, one (sdc1) to backup the system reserved, and 4TB for my new data (sdc2).

2) Cloned the original system reserved partition (sdb1) to sdc1, then cloned my original game/music/video data (sdb2) to sdc2.

3) Imaged my boot drive (sda) to my usual backup drive

4) Used easyBCD to move all of the boot files from the sdb1 to the root of my windows file system (sda1).

5) This obviously resulted in an overwritten MBR on my boot drive. Because windows, obvs. It also resulted in a "frozen" boot drive. Why? Who can say.

6) I booted into a live-linux environment, unfroze sda by power cycling it a few times until hdparm reported "not frozen", and used gparted to wipe the still bootable sys reserved partition on sdb1.

7) Still in the live environment, I mounted sda2 to /mnt, and then installed my previous GRUB to sda.

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

8) With a GRUB again, I booted into my real linux and ran:

update-grub

to detect the now bootable partion on sda2 and to drop the previously bootable sdb1.

9) At this point we were basically done. I powered down, replaced sdb with sdc, booted into linux to wipe the backup system reserved partition on sdc1, and then rebooted into windows.

10) Clean-up! Changed the drive letter assigned to sdc to the previous letter for sdb, rebooted, and noticed that while disk manager showed the correct capacity, the drives weren't reporting the new capacity. I ran a chkdsk, and then:

diskpart (as admin)
list volume
select volume X
extend filesystem

to finish extending the volume, and now everything reports correctly.

End result, my secondary drive now uses a GPT, is double capacity, and the system reserved partition is dead, with all of the relevant boot stuff is on my boot drive where it can all be backed up together.

 

[JoeBleed]

Thanks for not making one of these posts: https://xkcd.com/979/

I don't need this now, but i may latter. So may others.

I think i would have just said, "Screw it, i'm reinstalling" and then not left the storage drive hooked up while reinstalling.

Good work.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Heh, I was seriously considering just re-installing but my fiance was out of town, and I had a bunch of real work to procrastinate on, so obviously fighting with windows was the better use of the afternoon

Anyway, I hope it's helpful to someone else, that xkcd aptly describes one of the worst feelings in the world.