How To: Create recovery partition.

[Solaris17]

For awhile I had been wondering how to create a recovery partition to reinstall windows without the need do find my thumb drive or disk, or hell burn another. With that in mind i figured others would also like to know. Therefor I have created this Video (720P processing of vid can take upto 30min from orig post date stamp, quality will improve) and thread on how to create a BASIC recovery partition to install/repair a windows installation using a new or existing hard drive. Without the need to buy software.

Creating a recovery Partition

Creating and restoring from a current image

Feel free to sticky if you find it appropriate.

[Solaris17]

Troubleshooting Guide

1. Q: So you have broken your boot loader and need to know how to boot into windows?

A: If you are reading this you are probably looking at a black screen with alot of white letters and a stop code saying a file is missing. Good news no need to panic.

• The issue is that easyBCD has probably deleted your boot loader or you were experimenting and F**d up.
• To get this back I'm going to assume you made the recovery partition exactly how it was done in movie
• To fix your PC restart the computer and enter your boot menu (usually F10-F12 depending on pc) select the physical harddrive the recovery partition is on.
• You should now start booting the windows 7 installer. when you arrive at the main menu in the bottom left hand corner click "repair your computer" It will automatically scan and attempt to fix your problem. It should auto detect that the boot drive location is wrong.
• Simply agree with the prompt and press "fix/restart" not cancel. At your next boot you should be happily at your desktop.
• Now open easyBCD and fix the menu so it looks like the videos, or try your experiment again.

Faqs

• easyBCD (used for modifying the windows 7 and other windows OSs bootloader): Link
• camstudio (free open source desktop recorder): http://camstudio.org/
• This method can be used with any OS.
• easyBCD has a hard time loading some ISO images on some machines. You may need to change how the ISO is handled or try a different method. Linux Distributions suffer from this the most.

Note: I have broken my system on purpose in multiple ways at your expense to teach you how to repair issues that may arise.

[Anusha]

I tried it in a virtual box VM, but it gives me this error when trying to install Windows. Cannot get it to start.



What is that driver which is missing??? Not giving enough info about the error.

I really want to get this working with my Asus UL20A laptop. I lost the recovery partition and I don't have a USB DVD drive.

[Solaris17]

I don't know maybe it's a problem with being in a virtual machine, maybe it is a bad image. Try using it on an actual HDD. I can't provide trouble shooting for something that isn't being used in a way which I am familier.

I wouldn't use Virtual box. VMWare Player is more flexible and more stable. I got an IDE tape drive to work by assigning it to a SCSI tape device in VP. You can do pretty much anything you do with real machine. And it's free.

Plus if you use one of the P2V utilities like VMWare's vCenter converter or MS's disk2vhd, you can clone your os partition and run it in a VM.

Just be mindful of the file extensions for the utility you use. I think VMPlayer can convert from vhd, but you should check.

[newtekie1]

Awesome stuff, thanks!

[Anusha]

it worked when i copied all the files of the disk to the recovery partition i created, but i had to use WinPE tab to add the entry.

Type: WIM Image (Ramdisk)
Name: Recovery
Path: Z:\Sources\boot.wim
and hit Add Entry
I tried it in VirtualBox and it worked.
At first, it would add a second "Windows 7" entry to the list, but when the installation is finished, the old one is deleted. (I formatted only C: partition)

[Solaris17]

Post updated with failsafe method. Thanks Anusha for the enlightenment and making me go research why.

[Anusha]

sure thing.
i need this to work as there was no easy way to install windows on my laptop with no optical drive, and not supporting installing via USB stick. that was why i was so interested in it.

[Solaris17]

Originally Posted by Anusha

sure thing.
i need this to work as there was no easy way to install windows on my laptop with no optical drive, and not supporting installing via USB stick. that was why i was so interested in it.

thank you, im currently working on taking a snapshot of you current drive and making it so you can restore to it. That will be in post 2. that way you can avoid "fresh" formats. of course all using windows and not spending a cent on 3rd party programs.

[Anusha]

Originally Posted by Solaris17

thank you, im currently working on taking a snapshot of you current drive and making it so you can restore to it. That will be in post 2. that way you can avoid "fresh" formats. of course all using windows and not spending a cent on 3rd party programs.

cool. see if it works with RAID drives as well. Acronis Trueimage had problems when using the F11 option to go into the recovery mode. But it worked when you could launch the restore function from within Windows. But what if you cannot go into Windows, ha?

edit.
installing windows in the way given in the first post works even when the source as well as the destination are both RAID-0 volumes. This is my PC. http://goo.gl/2NfCu In that image, Disk 0 and 1 both are RAID-0 volumes.
Of course, didn't go ahead with the actual installation. XD Though it should not be a problem if it is kinda similar to clean installation method.

[Solaris17]

oh i know it will work no problem, what im going to show you how to do is how to set it up to restore a image of the drive. using the recovery tools in the windows installer. for example you would boot into recovery and choose to install from an image, and then pick the image, i will show you how to make. then it doesn't matter. as long as the aray exists their wont be an issue.

[Anusha]

Originally Posted by Solaris17

oh i know it will work no problem, what im going to show you how to do is how to set it up to restore a image of the drive. using the recovery tools in the windows installer. for example you would boot into recovery and choose to install from an image, and then pick the image, i will show you how to make. then it doesn't matter. as long as the aray exists their wont be an issue.

will check it out when you upload it.

[Solaris17]

updated check it out apply it tell your friends. Convince people its sticky worthy. Thanks for the appreciation. and enjoy the cheap laughs and modified lyrical concept.

[qubit]

I can't actually watch these while at work, but I'm sure they're awesome.

I personally use Paragon Hard Disc Manager for this type of thing, but there's lots of different ways to go about it.

[Completely Bonkers]

Thanks for creating and sharing. Very useful info.

[Solaris17]

any feedback? im actually surprised not because i like patting myself on the back but imo this seems important. perhaps my understanding of TPU intrests have wavered in the last months