Windows 7: Boot F9/F12 (recovery environment or boot menu)

If I hit F9 or F12 in early BIOS, I get a black screen with an underline cursor in upper left.

In the middle of the screen is a green block and the letter n with a tilde ~ over it.

How long should I wait? It sat there for 15 seconds and no movement. No keyboard or mouse actions can do anything.

I've never tried booting into the RE or Boot menu. But, on occasion when a boot would hang, I would get the DOS-like boot screen that asks if you want to start Widows normally, try safe mode, (all those options), etc.

Booting off DVD into Recovery environment works as expected.

Does this mean my System Reserved partition is whacked?

Your spec's say Custom built.
How did you setup your Recovery Partition on the Custom built rig?

Custom-built by CompUsa.

However, I did completely reinstall Windows 7 within the week that I got the new PC (can't recall why). What are the options for setting the Recovery partition other than size???

The Recovery Partition would have been set by CompUsa.
Try the F8 key.

Can you explain further? I haven't done a Windows 7 install for the last 2 years.

If I do a complete Windows 7 install from CD, is there anything in there to set up the System Reserved partition? Ah, I read that the Sys Res partition only gets created if NO partitions exist on the HD. I assume that if one were to completely wipe and repartition during fresh install, then the fresh install would ask for options re: Sys Res partition configuration?

I didn't try F8 as BIOS showed only F9 and F12 (Gigabyte MA-785GM-US2H MB).

For CompUsa Recovery Disks, check the CompUsa manual.

For a MS Windows 7 DVD, take a look at this tutorial:
SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

Thanks for the info. I don't recall ever getting a CompUSA recovery manual. Will look up online.

Are you also saying that even if the BIOS doesn't list F8 to get into winRE, that it is a "standard" across all MB manufacturers??

Recovery can be installed if not already there.
You need
1. "winre.wim" in \Windows\System32\winre.wim - if not there search whole disk, all partitions for it.
if not found get "boot.wim" from installation DVD and copy it to path mentioned and rename to winre.wim.
2. On elevated command prompt:
ReagentC /enable

Hope this helps.

Having thought more about this, it then would imply that F8 is NOT a BIOS option but a post-BIOS, pre-Win startup option that is really being recognized by Windows?

Also, the Gigabyte manual says F9 is for some driver disk hard drive backup thing (sounds like Gigabyte proprietary).

The F12 is to be able to set which device to boot from without entering the Full BIOS menu.

Either way, you'd think F12 would work.

Here is something quite similar:

http://forums.techarena.in/motherboa...am/1424937.htm

There are keys recognized by BIOS -
1. for entering BIOS setup, and
2. for choosing temporary (one time) boot device.

F8 is standard for advanced recovery options (recognized by bootmgr).

You can set any key as a shortcut to a loader - this is called "bootstrap custom action". This is handled again by bootmgr using data from BCD (boot config data) store.
If interested visit Visual BCD Editor - Windows 7/Vista - look for CustomActions.