How To Fix Broken Recovery Options after 8.1 Upgrade.

Geezanansa

New Member
Messages
10
What i am trying to do:
Update installation media and recovery options to reflect that of the current installed OS version.(8.1)

What i have done:

Updated to 8.1 from Store after running/using 8 which was originaly a clean install.


Had been using 8 installation media to access winRE but after recent issues with recovery options asking for installation media spent time to try and better understand all the recovery options as available in 8.1. Using the tutorial section of these forums suggest i have broken recovery as many options do not appear (including Automatic Repair) in Advanced Start Up Options.

After creating 8.1 DVD ISO then making this UEFI bootable reaslised Recovery options available are not what they should be.
The ISO was created as per http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/18309-windows-8-windows-8-1-iso-download-create.html which did not boot using EFI so used oscdimg to make it so as per Anybody gotten the DVD to boot UEFI? - Microsoft Community

This means i do have fallback recovery/reinstall options; thankfully.

After realising i can not make up a USB Start Up disk (http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/5132-recovery-drive-create-usb-flash-drive-windows-8-a.html) and am aware the WinRE partition on drive is empty; I need to place WinRE and system recovery image to that partition before it can be used or copied to any where else! - How?

Months ago i came across a webpage describing how 8.1 upgrade moved ESP to start of drive. Simply moving WinRE partition to start of drive fixed the Recovery options issues users were observing. Unfortunately i can not refind the page to what i am referring to but what i describe is the gist of what is described Sample: Configure UEFI/GPT-Based Hard Drive Partitions by Using Windows PE and DiskPart
After noticing recovery option issues and being unable to create a USB Start Up drive started moving partitions around.
diskpart sees my windows drive like

Code:
Volume 1       C                NTFS   Partition    118 GB  Healthy    Boot
Volume 2         WinRE        NTFS   Partition    480 MB  Healthy    Hidden
Volume 3         ESP          FAT32  Partition    150 MB  Healthy    System
and have made a 160GB Recovery Image partition on another drive. A recovery image was made and placed into that partition using the RecoveryDrive.exe utility which was around 75GB in size.

Diskpart should be showing the 128MB MSR partition but it does not!.... ?

How to fix?

What i think i want is:
1) WinRE and system image in the 480MB partition in addition to having the in OS winRE options as well as having the Recovery Image to fall back on before having to reinstall. I appreciate having UEFI bootable installation media is the ultimate solution but would like to configure 8.1 recovery options to a more usable configuration thus removing dependence on using installation media.

Many tutorials describe using winPE and winRE tools to configure Recovery options refer to using .wim files to fix windows image. Looking into this sheds some light that using the updated ADK for 8.1 it is now possible to use the .esd files.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 Pro
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Packard Bell imedia5055
    CPU
    2.6 ghz P4 Northwood
    Motherboard
    Gigabyte GA 8sml ver 1.0
    Memory
    2 GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    geforce 6800 GT
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