Solved Where is the system recovery partition on my Dell optiplex 780?

[Zindar]

Hello, I was told by the seller who sold me my computer that there is a protected recovery partition on my Dell which is used to recover Windows 7 during emergencies. I figure that since I'm backing up the hard drive (using macrium reflect) to protect myself in case of any future hard drive crash, I should include this partition in case I have to build a new replacement hard drive in the future.

When I open macrium reflect it's just showing me one hard disk (Disk 0), with two partitions:

100 MB (system reserved partition)
150 GB (C drive).

So is this 100 MB partition the system recovery partition? That seems mighty small to me. How could the entirety of the Windows 7 OS be built from 100 MB?

Also, I wanted to make sure I'm not confusing this with what Macrium refers to as the "master boot record". This 100 MB isn't that master boot record is it? To me 100 MB seems too big to be that. So I just want to understand what I'm looking at here.

 

[fireberd]

There is another partition, a hidden partition. Those two that you list are the standard partitions that Windows 7 installs, not the hidden partition.

Is the recovery partition still there? Press F8 at power on and then see if you can access PC Restore. If not, then that partition is gone.

Looking at Macrium, I don't see an option to include hidden partitions in the backup.

 

[Zindar]

If it helps, here is the disk management screen I was looking at:

Hitting <F8> takes me to a black screen with a bunch of choices like "Repair computer", "Safe mode", "debug mode", "start windows normally", and others. Is this it?

But if Macrium can't back up a hidden partition, it's moot anyhow. Plus, maybe that's overkill on my part. Having a recovery partition seems redundant when I already have Macrium as a strategy for recovering from a hard disk crash. So maybe I should stop worrying about it.

 

[fireberd]

That doesn't sound like the right area. You must press F8 at POWER ON, not at the point of Windows loading, which is a different F8 point.

I agree that its a "fault" in Macrium. I have the full paid version of Macrium, but as I have self built PC's I never had the need to backup a hidden partition.

 

[abdelazizz]

I think there is no recovery portion