Warning
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
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
1. Download Easy BCD 2.0 from here: EasyBCD 2.0 Beta Builds - The NeoSmart Forums (you will need to register on the forum first)
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)
Information
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
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