My Windows 7 computer came with a 100 MB partition that I believe may include a System Recovery capability.
If I boot the Advanced Startup Options using the F8 Key the first item in the list says "Repair Your Computer". However, if I hit Enter I get a screen asking about language but there is no cursor and I can't do anything other than hit reset.
Could this be a keyboard and mouse driver issue? I have a USB keyboard and mouse.
I believe if you get a USB to PS2 adapter it may work. Many techs carry a small PS2 keyboard in their toolkit because some BIOSes don't support USB keyboards. The adapter should only be a dollar or two.
I think you will find the 100MB is the "System Reserved" (active) partition and basically contains important boot files. F8 directs you to the winre.wim which should live on your OS partition.
100 mb is boot files. I believe mouse is non functional in the system recovery part. Keyboard only like in BIOS.
Art.
Not sure what you are getting at there, Art.I believe mouse is non functional in the system recovery part
Winre.wim should have mouse drivers. If it is an oem machine, there might be some specific drivers required.
You can try extracting the drivers from your running operating system, and see if there is anything that looks like oem specific mouse drivers. If so, you can install them permanenetly into winre.
Here: Attachment 322008
What exactly are you trying to Repair? If you're only wanting to familiarize yourself more with the OS and PC then you can go over it as thoroughly as you want using Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7
Last edited by gregrocker; 16 Jun 2014 at 22:24.
Re the mouse and keyboard. USB 3 port connections could cause problems. If you are using USB 3 try USB 2.
Thanks all for the help. I have an OEM system from a local computer shop and just wanted to understand all the capabilities. The 100 MB partition shows as System Reserved under Windows Disk Management and there is 70 MB free.
Since the Repair Your Computer option shows up under the Advanced Startup Options, I assumed I had the equivalent of the Recovery Console that I formerly used with WinXP. However, I don't know if it is located in the 100 MB partition or on the C: drive.
Keyboard and Mouse are connected through USB 2.0. I just checked the BIOS and USB Legacy Support is enabled. Recently I discovered on a WinXP system with Recovery Console that USB Legacy Support was required for the Recovery Console to work with USB keyboard and mouse.
I did try the tab key, arrow keys, and all function keys and absolutely nothing worked when trying to select English as the language. Looks like my next step is to try a PS2 keyboard and mouse.
If you install Windows 7 on a clean disk with no existing partitions, it creates a System Reserved partition at the beginning of the disk and uses the remainder of the unallocated space to create your system drive.That small partition isn’t assigned a drive letter, so you won’t even know it exists unless you look in the Disk Management console or use a low-level utility, such as Diskpart, to inspect the disk structure.
This “stub” of a partition, which is new in Windows 7, serves two functions. First, it holds the Boot Manager code and the Boot Configuration Database. Second, it reserves space for the startup files required by the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature. If you ever decide to encrypt your system drive using BitLocker, you won’t have to repartition your system drive to make it possible.
If you’re confident you’ll never use BitLocker and prefer to do without the additional complexity of this System Reserved partition, your best bet is to make sure it’s never created. For a truly clean installation starting from an unformatted hard drive, you must use a different disk-management utility, such as the setup disk available from many hard-disk manufacturers or a startup disk from Windows Vista. Create a single primary partition using all unallocated space, and then point the installer to the newly created partition as the setup location. (Note that you cannot use the graphical disk-management tools available from the Windows 7 DVD to perform this task.) After you use the alternative tool to create a partition on the drive, you can point the Windows 7 installer to that location and it will proceed.
If you’re comfortable with command-line disk management tools, you can use the Diskpart utility from the setup program to create the necessary partition. At the begin¬ning of setup, before you select the location where you want to install Windows:
Press Shift+F10 to open a Command Prompt window
Type diskpart to enter the Diskpart environment
Assuming you have a single clean hard disk, use select disk 0 and create partition primary to manually create a new partition
Proceed with the Windows 7 setup, using this new partition as the setup location
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