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#1
Can't see all of my partitions in ASUS recovery tool
I have an ASUS Essentio desktop computer with no recovery DVD (didn't come with it). It came pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. After the last Windows automated update, "something" went wrong (I wasn't here; I suspect my computer-illiterate husband killed the after-restart part of the update process because he was in a hurry) and it froze on the "Starting Windows" screen no matter how I tried to start it up. I had a Windows 7 Pro 32-bit DVD that I had purchased for another computer, so I installed that on this computer and I'm running fine for now. However, the license for that DVD is only good for an upgrade from Vista so I can't activate it for a fresh install. I need to recover the original Windows installation that came with this computer, which I do have the product key for (not to mention the fact that I need my 64-bit installation back so I can access all 6GB of memory!).
So I poked around a bit online and found instructions for using the recovery partition and tried that. I got into the recovery tool fine by pressing F9 on startup. But the only option is to recover the system (fine, that's what I want to do, but it doesn't match the online documentation), and the only partition I can see is a 100MB partition (it shows up as System Reserved on the Disk Management tool - see screen shot). If I click Next, of course it says I need at least a 2GB partition and recovery can't proceed.
In the Disk Management tool, I don't see any partition labeled Recovery as it says in the documentation, but I do have one 8GB unnamed partition on Disk 0. Disk 1 is an additional physical SATA hard drive that I installed; the other two unnamed partitions are on Disk 1 along with the Z: partition where I keep my music and where I have now backed up all of my user data.
Have I managed to somehow wipe out my recovery partition? It seems like I wouldn't be able to get into the recovery tool at all if that were the case. Should I even be able to see a "hidden" partition on the Disk Management tool? How do I get the recovery tool to see the other partitions on Disk 0? Will reformatting Disk 0 or one of its partitions make it visible to the recovery tool? I have everything I care about from Disk 0 backed up to Disk 1 (which I will unplug if I do any formatting), so I'm fine with reformatting any or all of it, but I don't want to bother doing that if it definitely won't fix my problem.
I appreciate any help with this!