THIS IS NOT INTENDED TO REPLACE YOUR WINDOWS 7 DVD, HARD DRIVES FAIL, AND YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HANG ONTO THE DISK, THIS IS SIMPLY TO SPEED UP THE PROCESS OF REINSTALLING OR DOING A RECOVERY
This recovery partition will only be available to you assuming that your bootmanager is in tact, if it becomes corrupted it will be inaccessible just like your copy of windows, another good reason for hanging on to the original disk
Note
it is recommended that you allow windows to create the 100MB System reserved partition upon installation if you plan to do this or you will have to repeat it everytime you reinstall
2. open disk management, (type "partition" into the start menu its the first option that comes up)
3a Right click a partition with free space, and click "Shrink Volume" when it asks you to select how much space to shrink by allocate 4GB or 4096MB
3b Right Click the Unallocated Space and Click "New Simple Volume"
4. click ok through the next few screens, i recommend assigning it letter Z:\ so you dont get confused and accidentally delete it or save other files here
5. place your Windows 7 DVD in your drive and go to Computer, right click and then click Open NOTE:At this point please make sure you have "hide protected operating system files" DISABLED as it occasionally corrupts the copy, to do this press alt in any explorer window, then click tools>folder options>views>hide protected operating system files.
6. Copy the entire contents of the DVD to your Z:\ Partition
7. open Easy BCD and click "add/remove entries" click the tab labelled WinPE,
When it asks for a path browse to "Z:\sources\boot.wim" and click ok, then click "add new entry" NOTE:At this point there is a good chance easybcd will tell you that the operation failed, just click ok and do it again, from what i can see this is simply its way of asking if your sure, and it will work 2nd time around.
8. thats it your done, when you reboot you will have 2 options, Windows 7, and NST WinPE Image, NST WinPE image is your recovery partition and will act as if you'd put the disk in.
Note
It has come to my attention that Windows has an annoying habit of corrupting the Recovery Partition, especially after Disk Cleanups and Defrags. To get around this Open Disk Management (type it into the start menu) and right click your Recovery Partition, remove the letter so that windows cant see it any more. (Don't worry it will still boot, this just stops Windows from writing files to it)
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This tutorial is the intellectual property of (c)2009 Martin Joy a.k.a severedsolo and is only authorised to be hosted on sevenforums.com This tutorial is not to be copied without my explicit consent and when consent is granted the original author must be credited along with a link to this tutorial
no problem, im thinking of doing a similar one explaining how to get rid of the old Vista recovery Partition and linking to this tutorial to explain how to replace it with a Win 7 one, would anyone be interested in that?
Computer type PC/Desktop System Manufacturer/Model Number Self Built OS Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1 CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz Motherboard Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz Memory 8GB 1333Mhz DDR3 Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Sound Card Realtek Monitor(s) Displays Acer Al1980, Screen Resolution 1360*768
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Makes it easy to replace that recovery partition when you get a new OS.
I make a partition that will hold an image of my hard drive, and keep a recent copy there as well as on my external hard drive. Makes it faster when I re-image.
Computer type PC/Desktop System Manufacturer/Model Number Self Built OS Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1 CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz Motherboard Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz Memory 8GB 1333Mhz DDR3 Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Sound Card Realtek Monitor(s) Displays Acer Al1980, Screen Resolution 1360*768
Keyboard Alba USB Mouse IT Works Wireless USB PSU 750W Cooler Master Case Cooler Master Haf X Cooling Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Hard Drives 500GB SATA WBC
1TB WD Caviar Green
80GB IDE Samsung Internet Speed 12Mb/s Down 1.2 Mb/s Up
Computer type Laptop System Manufacturer/Model Number HP ENVY 17-1150eg OS Windows 7 x64 Ultimate CPU 1.6 GHz Intel Core i7-720QM Processor Memory 6 GB Graphics Card ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 Graphics Sound Card Beats sound system with integrated subwoofer Monitor(s) Displays 17" laptop display, 22" LCD and 32" Full HD TV through HDMI Screen Resolution 1600*900, 1680*1050 and 1920*1080
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External: 2TB for backups, 3TB USB3 network drive for media Internet Speed 50/10 Mbps VDSL Antivirus MSE, Windows Defender Browser Maxthon 3.5.2. Other Info Windows 7 Ultimate Retail Full in English, additional Guest-user accounts in Finnish, German and Swedish (Working languages English & Swedish, Family language German, my own language, mother tongue, Finnish. I really need Ultimate to get to use Language Packs!)
SIW2 - thank you have deleted that step as it is now irrelevant, renaming it doesnt work, although everything recognises it as the new name, the actual bootloader entry will still read NST winPE Image, there is a warning at the top stating that it is not a substitution for the original installation media, i do not see the point of stating it twice
Kari - Great idea, Unfortunately, i dont have the technical expertise to write this into the guide, if anyone would like to fill me in on how to do this ill happily include it
Computer type PC/Desktop System Manufacturer/Model Number Self Built OS Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1 CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz Motherboard Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz Memory 8GB 1333Mhz DDR3 Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 Sound Card Realtek Monitor(s) Displays Acer Al1980, Screen Resolution 1360*768
Keyboard Alba USB Mouse IT Works Wireless USB PSU 750W Cooler Master Case Cooler Master Haf X Cooling Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Hard Drives 500GB SATA WBC
1TB WD Caviar Green
80GB IDE Samsung Internet Speed 12Mb/s Down 1.2 Mb/s Up
Hmm, interesting. But what would be the advantage of this approach over writing an image of your OS partition to a seperate partition on one of your drives (preferably another drive than where the OS resides) after you are all done with your installation. That would also cover Kari's comment.
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there is a warning at the top stating that it is not a substitution for the original installation media, i do not see the point of stating it twice
LOL - touchy...
Adding info that it is reliant on the boot management process - not just the health of the HD.
Nevertheless, it can be a useful addition. It allows reinstall of a clean o/s , e.g. onto another partition - can be useful if you have a problem getting into the original installation.
Not sure what advantage it offers over an image , as whs says.
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