In this paper we establish existence and nonexistence results concerning fully nontrivial minimal energy solutions of the nonlinear Schrödinger systemWe consider the repulsive case b < 0 and assume that the exponent q satisfies 1 < q < n n−2 in case n ≥ 3 and 1 < q < ∞ in case n = 1 or n = 2. For space dimensions n ≥ 2 and arbitrary b < 0 we prove the existence of fully nontrivial nonnegative solutions which converge to a solution of some optimal partition problem as b → −∞. In case n = 1 we prove that minimal energy solutions exist provided the coupling parameter b has small absolute value whereas fully nontrivial solutions do not exist if 1 < q ≤ 2 and b has large absolute value.