Friday 30 March 2018

Increasing the size of the system partition

I have a MINIX NEO Z83-4.  It's a great idea for a small cheap lightweight computer.  Not really got enough SSD to run Windows 10 properly however.  Only 29G.  The EFI System partition was only 64M.

I've always had problems updating Windows 10: basically it always tries and fails to update.  So I'm way behind on security.  Recently I got a scary notice after failing to update saying that my computer couldn't run Windows10 and that this version was being end of lifed in a couple of weeks.  So I thought I should do something about it.

The actual error I got this time from Windows Update was "Couldn't update System Reserve".  Googling around I found this which seems to match my problems:
http://www.minixforum.com/threads/couldnt-update-system-reserve.17218/
That links here as a way of fixing the problem
http://www.minixforum.com/threads/it-is-possible-to-install-windows-creator-update.16565/

I downloaded the partition tool that was suggested https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

I tried to follow the original instructions for resizing the partition, but I came across the same problem that others had: I had a 'Reserved Partition' that was unmovable so I couldn't expand the 'EFI System partition'. 

As you can see from the image I have compressed the main windows partition 'Data Partition' and created 386M free space to expand the 'EFI System partition' into, but the highlighted partition is fixed and cannot move.


Reading through the posts some people have deleted this reserved partition (as I was tempted to do) and the computer doesn't boot any more. I found I was able to effectively move the reserved partition using the windows tool 'diskpart' and this then allowed me to expand the EFI System partition.  Here's how:
  1. Delete the 16M Reserved Partition that was preventing me from expanding the EFI System Partition (I recreate it later)
  2. Now I expanded the EFI System Partition using the free partition wizard. Making sure to leave at least 16M free between the EFI System Partition and the Data Partition though because I needed to recreate the Reserved Partition there
  3. Apply the changes you want to make by hitting the 'Apply' button
  4. open a cmd window (hit the windows key, then type 'cmd' and it should highlight cmd, then press enter
  5. I had a play about with diskpart to work out what to do. I just typed help for a list of instructions. To create the reserved partition I did this
  1. list disk
  2. select disk 0 (or the disk number you need to change)
  3. list disk (you should see a '*' next to the disk you need to change)
  4. create partition msr (This is the money shot. msr is 'microsoft reserved partition' and it will create it in the 16M space you have just created.)
  5. Now refresh your partition wizard and you can see it's been created.

I still need to find some more space to actually install the update, but at least the system partition should be large enough now.