Added Drive Letter to Recovery Partition, Then Removed... Now Broken

[StrongEagle]

I have two virtually identical Dell laptops running Windows Home Premium.

On one of them I wanted to see what was in the hidden RECOVERY partition so I fired up Disk Manager and added a drive letter. Nothing in the partition made sense to me so I removed the drive letter.

However, windows no longer recognizes the RECOVERY partition. If I run standard windows "Create System Repair Disc", I get an error message "The parameter is incorrect 0x80070057".

The Dell DataSafe program also says it cannot find the RECOVERY partition.

a) Is there some kind of attribute that got changed when I assigned the drive letter and then removed it? If yes, how can I set it back?

b) The laptops are virtually identical. Can I use a recovery disk from one on the other? I'm particularly interested in keeping MS Office 2010 Starter edition intact when I upgrade to Win 7 Pro.

TIA

 

[bigmck]

The recovery partition should have a letter. The System Reserved does not have one. Can you post a
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html and I can look at it and see what is wrong. Be sure and widen the columns so all of the print can be read.

 

[StrongEagle]

The first images below are from the laptop where I assigned a letter to the RECOVERY partition and then removed it, ie, the one with the error messages.

The next two images are from the laptop where I made no changes and am able to create a recovery disk.

Thank you for looking into this.

 

[jackmiller]

Hi,

The RECOVERY PARTITION is a hidden partition which was remained by your laptop manuafacture. ok its used to recover your OS when your OS is broken down(or lost or something).If you would be careful you can see that when you booting your laptop,there is a tip "press F8(for e.g) to enter recovery interface".well.this is the effect of "RECOVERY PARTITON".once it is deleted .you can not enter it.

Certainly you can not use a recovery disk from one on the other,it is just a partition ,not a hard disk,how could you move it onto another laptop..then.if your MS office was installed at C: drive .i wish you would better make a backup before you upgrade.if its not in C: .just dont worry.the upgrade does not have any impact on your MS office and recovery partition matters nothing to upgrade,and after you have upgraded your laptop.the error message no longer occurs

well.If you really want the RECOVERY partition back.i know there is a free partitioning software "MINITOOL partition wizard" has a function that can recover your lost or deleted partition.

 

[SPARROW913]

The drive letter of RECOVERY Partition cannot be changed. If you changed the letter the system recovery can not be rooted. Even worse, the system would be broken. This is why you did not find RECOVERY Partition. You can use MiniTool Powerful Data Recovery to find the lost partition. So there is no necessary to do your "b".

 

[StrongEagle]

The partition is not deleted. Nor am I trying to copy it from one PC to another. I want to know why it is no longer accessible after giving it a drive letter and then removing the drive letter. See the images above.

Hi,

The RECOVERY PARTITION is a hidden partition which was remained by your laptop manuafacture. ok its used to recover your OS when your OS is broken down(or lost or something).If you would be careful you can see that when you booting your laptop,there is a tip "press F8(for e.g) to enter recovery interface".well.this is the effect of "RECOVERY PARTITON".once it is deleted .you can not enter it.

Certainly you can not use a recovery disk from one on the other,it is just a partition ,not a hard disk,how could you move it onto another laptop..then.if your MS office was installed at C: drive .i wish you would better make a backup before you upgrade.if its not in C: .just dont worry.the upgrade does not have any impact on your MS office and recovery partition matters nothing to upgrade,and after you have upgraded your laptop.the error message no longer occurs

well.If you really want the RECOVERY partition back.i know there is a free partitioning software "MINITOOL partition wizard" has a function that can recover your lost or deleted partition.

 

[jumanji]

Just curious to know whether you used any third party program to assign the drive letter and remove it. Some third-party software may cause changes to the runtime locale of the computer and override the setting in Control Panel.

Anyway, just check what decimal Symbol is assigned now on your Dell machine with the problem..

Open Control Panel, and then click Region and Language.
Click the Formats tab, and then click Additional settings tab at the bottom.
In the Decimal symbol field, type . (dot), - if it is anything other than dot - and then click OK
then Apply, then OK.
Restart the computer.

As a good measure you can check what symbol is assigned on your other Dell machine. Make sure you have the same symbol on your problematic DELL Machine.

 

[bigmck]

Strong Eagle -- Post #4 and #5 is the posters first post on this forum. You would be better off to follow Jumanji help.

 

[StrongEagle]

Just curious to know whether you used any third party program to assign the drive letter and remove it. Some third-party software may cause changes to the runtime locale of the computer and override the setting in Control Panel.

No, adding a drive letter, then removing the drive letter was done only with Windows Disk Manager.

Anyway, just check what decimal Symbol is assigned now on your Dell machine with the problem..

Open Control Panel, and then click Region and Language.
Click the Formats tab, and then click Additional settings tab at the bottom.
In the Decimal symbol field, type . (dot), - if it is anything other than dot - and then click OK
then Apply, then OK.
Restart the computer.

As a good measure you can check what symbol is assigned on your other Dell machine. Make sure you have the same symbol on your problematic DELL Machine.

The Decimal setting was DOT/period. I retyped it and rebooted just for fun... the error remains.

I recall reading that there is a partition type/attribute (not displayed on Disk Manager) that shows whether the partition is hidden/recovery... but I can't find the article. Perhaps this is the issue.

Appreciate your insights.

 

[bigmck]

Here is a fix for your error message. See if this works. BEST FIX: Steps to Fix Windows Update Error 0x80070057