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#11
Yeah I'd never even looked at the size before to be honest Greg, I'd always just assumed it was 100Mb. I'll get round to the Uncover Recovery Partition shortly.
Yeah I'd never even looked at the size before to be honest Greg, I'd always just assumed it was 100Mb. I'll get round to the Uncover Recovery Partition shortly.
I am here on Greg's request to find and identify the contents of the rogue 3.42 GB partition and help him deciding whether to reclaim the space occupied it or not. Probably it will be a FAT32 partition with some OEM recovery/repair tools hidden. As an easy way to identify the contents, i would suggest "PartitionGuru Free".
Recover deleted files, Partition manager and Windows backup - PartitionGuru
Select the rogue partition to list it's contents on the right pane and then take snapshot to upload with next reply. You can also try unhiding the partition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTvqEzmembw
After unhiding, right click the mouse button on the partition, select "Assign New Drive Letter" item from the popup menu. A new drive letter will be added and the partition will appear on "Windows Explorer".
It appears to have boot files and WinRE only. I don't know if they moved WinRE off of C or why they put it there. Can you ask them?
Check C:\Recovery with PGuru.
It will be interesting to see whether this "WinRE.wim" is registered as the default recovery environment boot image. Booot in to "Windows 8" and enter the below command in an elevated prompt.
Reagentc /info >D:\WinRE.txt
This will produce "WInRE.txt" on the root of "D". Please attach it with next reply.
Code:Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration Information: Windows RE status: Enabled Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: b40d317d-e27c-11e3-9d95-b23a3a464e09 Recovery image location: Recovery image index: 0 Custom image location: Custom image index: 0
I don't know why they wasted 3gb of your drive on empty space in a Recovery folder with WinRE unless they think it is safer than having it on C like everyone else has. Makes me wonder what else funky they did with the install and why there is no System flag on Recov as should be.
TBH I'd feel a lot better if it there was a perfect install same as Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 deleting both Recov and C to create and format New in the space.
Short of that if Startup Repairs will not assign the System flag then you could delete Recovery with Diskpart "Delete Partition Override" to create a 200mb Primary NTFS System Reserved in the space, Mark Partition Active then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times to write the System boot files there, add 8 again from Win7 using EasyBCD if necessary.
Let's hear what Ahmad and SIW2 think, keeping in mind your complaint is a longer boot time than before and also whether we should overlook no System flag on the System partition. Other opinions?
The partition is essentially flagged as hidden and that is why "Disk Management" is not showing the "System" flag - just like it is not showing the file system type. I think it will be safer to delete this partition using "Partition Wizard" bootable CD, resize "C" to claim the space, Marking "C" as Active and then running "Startup Repair" to recreate a new BCD store.Makes me wonder what else funky they did with the install and why there is no System flag on Recov as should be.