Windows 10: Secondary partitions are marked as System meaning I cannot create a System Image

Hello,


I'm trying to create a System Image on a 500GB partition on a 4TB hard drive. I only want to backup the C drive.


When I go to create the System Image, I see that Windows wants to include the C, D and E drives and has marked them all as "System". The E Drive contains Windows Store games, so I assume that might be why. However, the D drive has nothing that Windows should require.


This means that my System Image is far too big from my little 500GB partition.


What is going on with this? Is there a fix so that only C is backed up?

:)

 

Exclude partition from system image.

I have two drives in my system.

Disk manager details - The first drive has 3 partitions:

• System Reserved (System, Active, Primary)
• Windows 7 (Page File, Primary)
• Data Partition 1 (Primary)

The second drive has 2 partitions

• Windows 10 (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary)
• Data Partition 2 (Primary)

The first data partition has user profiles and shares used for both operating systems. The second data partition is just extra space to hold data temporarily.

This being said, I would like to create a system image with everything but the second data partition. However, it shows up as a system partition in the system image creation module. If fact, all the partitions except Windows 7 show as system and are default
selected and cannot be deselected.

Why does the second data partition show as system? Can I remove the system attribute? I have made sure nothing on this volume is indexed and that it does not contain any page, hibernation, or other system files. One of the folders is compressed, but that
is the only thing special on the volume.

 

Creating a system image

Windows 10 is currently installed, what im doing is im creating a system image on a 1TB external USB HDD, i want to install windows 7 alongside windows 10. i was told that in order to accomplish this feat, i would have to wipe windows 10, install windows
7, and then 10 again. i just was wondering if it is different with system images.

 

Help, cant create windows image

Hello there, @fullinfusion!

It seems like some sort of an OS confusion has happened with your secondary WD Black and I'm sorry to hear about that. *Frown
Maybe re-formatting it would help indeed as the community already mentioned. I'd suggest to take a look at this step-by-step how to partition and format an HDD: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=PYCoid
Keep in mind that this will wipe clean the drive, so you should backup all important data from the drive somewhere else.
I noticed from the screenshots that your HDD appears as Disk 0, this means that it's plugged in the primary SATA port where the SSD (as an OS drive) should be. Actually it is possible that because of this Windows cannot create the image there. Swap the ports of the SSD and the HDD, this might help as well.

Keep me posted. Hope this helped! *Smile
SuperSoph_WD