300MB Recovery Partition is empty

This is a clean install on a HP laptop. Everything is working fine but Im confused about what files are supposed to be in this partition in the first place, as i have read both that it contains winre.wim and that winre.wim is in the c:\windows\system32\recovery folder. The latter doesn't make sense to me, isn't the whole point of having a recovery partition to separate the recovery files in case the OS crashes? About 6 months ago i had an issue with windows 7 recovery environment not supporting usb 3, i had no trouble making sense of the recovery partition and locating the winre.wim file to inject the necessary drivers so i could use my keyboard and mouse. Ive found no information to let me know if i should expect win 8 recovery partitions to be structred the same and contain the same files as win 7. I did a clean install so i could give the laptop to my brother and the recovery partition before the clean install had some files but all looked to be support files like .xml's. Im missing something clearly. Any info would be appreciated my google searches bring up the same generic info.

The recovery files are hidden from system..
Open command prompt and type
reagentc /info
it should tell you what disk and in what partition you can find winre.wim

It says its on the 300MB parition. I read somewhere it might not show up even when you enable view hidden files and folders so i used MiniTool Partition Wizard which would supposedly show me what i wanted to see but i still see nothing. Just shows the system volume info.

Assign Drive letter "R" to partition using diskpart...
then
attrib -a -h -r -s R:\Recovery\WindowsRE

Path Not Found. Doesn't seem there's anything in there.

Any other thoughts?