sorry it took me so long to reply
I was in the same boat as most people with the ramdisk error. My Windows 8 Pro was an upgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate (the $40 upgrade) and for some reason after the upgrade my system reserved partition disappeared...
I really didnt want to recreate Windows from a clean install (was waiting till i build my next PC to bother with a clean install) so i decided to try the solution at http://microsofttime2stepup.blogspot.com/
After some work, my PC accepted the 8.1 upgrade and it ended an 6 month struggle with this issue
I have a custom built PC that is still using parts from 2008 and older:
asus mobo p5n-d
nvidia 750i SLI chipset
core 2 quad Q6600
nvidia 8 series graphics card (sorry i dont remember the model of the top of my head)
I didnt exactly follow all of the steps that were in the link that i posted. I didnt want to bother with buying the software the person recommended so I used an linux OS instead for that part.
As for your issue with the SRP being too small, only way i could think of making it bigger would be:
use a software to assign the partition a drive letter, increase the size, and then remove the drive letter
or
delete the SRP and create a new partition. then use the windows 8 recovery disk to recreate the SRP and bootmgr
both of those steps are risky because if you slip up, you wont be able to boot into windows and will get startup errors