Similarly, Windows 8 and 8.1 have a (larger, but still too small) System Reserved partition, and some preinstalled Windows PCs may have other backup, boot, recovery or system partitions too.
100MB isn’t enough for WinPE to do its thing, so you get the error message. But Windows 7 creates a 100MB, usually hidden, “System Reserved” partition. The fault is actually that WinPE tries to copy to the first active partition on the drive, which logic suggests would be C. However, it couldn’t do this as it said the drive was full.
When WinPE starts a capture, it copies some files to the local machine’s main system partition (usually drive C:). Unfortunately, this failed too with numerous errors, the main one being 80004004, but also 8007004005. Files were copied to the local machine, and it then rebooted into WinPE and started capturing. I tried the other capture method, which is booting the machine into Windows then triggering the capture from there. This seemed odd, as there was a good 60GB free on the local machine, and over 1TB free on the server I was going to save the captured image on. When booting to Windows PE over the network, choosing all our usual capture options, and then triggering the capture, an error message came up – “not enough free space”. However, it failed using both methods we’d used previously.
After creating a new install of Windows 7, with all the software on I wanted, I then tried to use our Windows Deployment Services Server to capture the image.