Well, it was certainly my understanding, but I tried to give way gracefully as I didn't want to get involved in an unseemly argument.
From my point of view, I'd rather keep the system reserved partition, because the F8 shortcut can be very useful at times.
I'm not trying to be ungraceful or enter into an unseemly argument. Bill2's response was quite definite and I'm more than happy to learn. I was hoping that pointing to the F8 fix provided by another member may help readers.
My sentiments exactly and I do apologise for any misunderstanding.
The F8-repair your computer link depends on 2 components- the recovery environment (RE) files and some bcd entries. The RE files are placed on the hard disk by default during the win7 installation. Now, they are not placed in sysres (sysres is usually too small to hold them), they are placed on the C: drive. The location is either the hidden folder C:\recovery or the hidden folder C:\recovery\<GUID>. Although I've seen some OEM machines with 1.5 gig sysres partitions with the RE files inside that partition, probably the way the OEM designed it.
When one installs without sysres, the boot files are placed on the windows partition. So bcd will be in C:\Boot folder. No harm comes to bcd by being placed there. It can still contain the boot menu entries bootmgr needs to look up including those required for the F8 thing.
I've experimented with clean installing on several machines without sysres- what I find is that some automatically install the F8 function while on others I can enable it through reagentc. More research is required into this. As for SIW2's post, its correct but 2 more things. One the RE files already exist on the C: drive so if F8 is missing, one can just run reagentc commands pointing to those files. Second, the /bootkey switch is not necessary- in my experiments I ran reagentc without that switch and set re path to the files in C:\recovery and F8 got enabled. BTW, reagentc just creates some bcd entries, the same entries can be created manually with bcdedit.
Anyway, the point of the earlier post was simply that sysres is not indispensable for F8 function to work.
Yes I know the Winre files live here
and not in the system reserved partition which contains ~30MB of data.
The issue is
When the BCD is rebuilt in the OS partition is the F8 scan code intercepted and Winre.wim mounted. It is my understanding that the answer is no so effectively the F8 function disappears unless you perform the Reagentc commands. Even then I'm not sure that you can use the F8 scan code and need to use something like F9.
I have 8 machines running win7 clean installed without sysres partition- every one of them has a functioning F8 entry.
So then F8 function works on a clean install with no system reserved to begin with.
I wonder if the rebuilding of the BCD using the repair function on the system repair disk or with "bootrec" is where you might loose the F8 function? This is for situations where the original install included the system reserved partition.
I just ran bootrec /rebuildbcd on one of my machines with no sysres and the F8 option is undisturbed. See ya later, work beckons.
Y'all are speaking a language with which I am unfamiliar!For the benefit of the OP, I just yesterday had a problem with my Acer Netbook whereby an uninstall did not uninstall properly, and a driver was (apparently) left behind, such that it BSODed on reboot. Ouch. Try it again--I get a window says "Repair this installation? (Recommended) or Boot to Windows?" so I try to boot Windows again. Nope, another BSOD. So I do F8 and get that screen we're familiar with and try to Safe Boot. No dice, another BSOD. Finally I boot again, get again the "Repair? or Windows?" screen and do Repair, and it cranks away and eventually says "You want to use a recent Restore Point" and "This may/may not work and you may have to try Repair again until it works" but sure enough, the Restore worked and I recovered to a point before the uninstall for that nasty program that had failed.
I'd never seen this "Repair your Windows installation?" before, apparently an Acer thing, but it was a godsend, because the Acer has no CD/DVD drive from which to attempt a conventional repair. Its hard drive comes with 3 partitions: A "RESERVED" 12Gb and a 100MB (Boot I assume) and finally a C:\ partition which consumed the remainder of the drive, a 250Gb one. I assume that the RESERVED partition (not of course normally in view of Windows i.e. no drive letter assigned like the 100MB) had all the Windows repair files on it.
My long-winded way of saying to anyone reading this, "Beware of what you backup-or-don't-backup-or-retain from your factory-built PC. It may have goodies you will want someday."
If someone here understands this Acer I've described, I WOULD be interested to know how *I* might build a PC with this special Repair partition and "Repair or try Windows again?" dialog. It was pretty cool... :)
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