Solved: Cannot See System Reserved Partition in Windows 10 or 7

Cannot see System Reserved partition?

"I am trying to update Windows 10 and it keeps giving me an error and saying that 'We couldn't update system reserved partition' I have gone into Windows File Explorer but could not see the system reserved partition. I would appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction."

About System Reserved partition

When you install Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 operating system on a clean hard drive, a “System Reserved” partition will be created automatically at the beginning of the hard disk. This special partition saves two important types of data:

1. The Boot Manager and Boot Configuration Data: When the PC starts up, the Windows Boot Manager will read the boot data from the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) Store. Your computer starts the boot loader off from the System Reserved partition, which in turn starts OS from your system partition.

2. The startup files required for BitLocker Drive Encryption: If you encrypt your disk with BitLocker drive encryption, the System Reserved partition contains the necessary files for starting up your computer. Your computer boots the unencrypted System Reserved partition, and then decrypts the boot partition and starts the encrypted Windows operating system.

Why you can’t see system reserved partition in Windows 10?

The System Reserved partition is of great importance, especially for those who use BitLocker drive encryption, so Windows normally does not assign a drive letter to this partition in order to protect it from being modified or deleted by mistake. That’s might be the main reason for which you cannot see System Reserved partition in Windows 10 or 7 File Explorer (it is well-known that only a partition with a drive letter can be visible in File Explorer). Under this situation, you can see this partition in Disk Management.

Apart from the absence of drive letter, there is also another popular cause is that this System Reserved partition has been deleted accidentally. In this case, you cannot even see or find System Reserved partition in Disk Management.

How to make system reserved partition visible in Windows PC?

According to the above causes that make System Reserved partition missing on Windows 10, 8, 7, there are two methods to solve this problem.

Method 1. Manually assign a drive letter to System Reserved partition

To assign a drive letter to a partition, one of the convenient tools is the Window built-in Disk Management.

Step 1. Press Win+R at the same time to open "Run" dialogue. Input "diskmgmt.msc" to open Disk Management.

Step 2. Locate the System Reserved partition, right-click on it and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths...".

Step 3. In the pop-up window, click "Add".

Step 4.In the next window, choose a proper drive letter for the System Reserved partition using the drop-down menu and click "OK".

Finally, the System Reserved partition will show up in Windows File Explorer and you can also access the inside data.

Method 2. Recover deleted System Reserved partition

If you cannot see System Reserved partition in both Windows File Explorer and Disk Management because it is deleted, then a professional partition recovery tool is necessary. Here, we highly recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, which allows you to recover NTFS and FAT32 partitions that are deleted in Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8, 7, XP and Vista. You can download the demo version for a free trial.

Step 1 (Optional). If your computer cannot boot successfully due to the deleted System Reserved partition, you can first create a bootable media and enter WinPE environment to perform the partition recovery. If your PC can start up normally, skip to the next step.

Step 2. Install and AOMEI Partition Assistant software. At the top navigation pane, click “Recovery” > “Partition Recovery” in turn.

Step 3. Select the disk that contained the System Reserved partition in the pop up window.

Step 4. Select a search method: Fast Search (recommended) or Full Search. Click "Next".

Step 5. Select the deleted System Reserved partition from the result and click "Proceed" to do the recovery.

Step 6. When the partition is recovered successfully, you'll see "Congratulations!" information. Click "Finish" to exit.

Finally, the System Reserved partition will be retrieved and you can see it in Windows Disk Management.

Summary

So, when you cannot see System Reserved partition in the Windows 10, 7 or other operating system, you can try the above two methods to make it visible and accessible. If you just ran into the "We couldn’t update system reserved partition" issue for it does not have enough space, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional allows you to extend System Reserved partition easily with “Merge Partitions” or “Allocate Free Space”. To use such amazing disk partition manager on Windows Server, please use AOMEI Partition Assistant Server instead.