[Schiiwa]

Tripredacus, on 05 December 2011 - 03:34 PM, said:

Vista and 7 used slightly different boot methods to get to their WinRE. I find this great because Vista was a pain to do compared to 7.

You already mentioned this at least 2 times, but i know that already, as the first experimentations happened under Vista, now i try to understand 7's

Tripredacus, on 05 December 2011 - 03:34 PM, said:

Anyways, the System Reserved partition may not be 100% required, but since creating it with a recovery partition is required (for support purposes) I never tried to deploy it without one. But yes, the SR partition is marked as active. The order should be:

1. System Reserved
2. Recovery
3. Windows

Maybe i will try this layout and hope to be able to boot to win-r.e. without windows!

Tripredacus, on 05 December 2011 - 03:34 PM, said:

The reason why it boots into Windows and not WinRE each time is because the WinRE partition is marked as a hidden boot volume. So in this case, the BIOS of a computer picks the first available boot volume, the one with Windows on it because it can't see the WinRE partition.

The reason to put the recovery partition first, or the service partition even back in XP days at the beginning of the disk did have some sort of reason for it. I forgot it by now. But you can definately have a recovery partition after the OS volume, for example I always installed the SoftThinks recovery partition (for XP) at the end of the disk just because it was easier to do, and they didn't seem to care what partition it was when dealing with support issues.

It would appear that none of my Microsoft documentation talks about the relevance of the location of the recovery partition.

I know that is possible, because i created successful a Recovery as the 4th partition (behind 1system-res.,2nd windows, 3rd data)... But i wanted to have no access to it to prevent it from viruses or incompetent access (remember, this PC is for my lil' brother) I now remember, that the location at the beginning is always mentioned in relation with the ID27-partition! When i tryed to give the ID27 to this 4th partition, my problem was, that i recaptured the Winre.wim, which wasn´t bootable. This created the failture at booting, but i thought the id27 is the problem...

Question1: (don´t think this will work)
Gremo used the 1st partition as active as u can see here:
http://www.msfn.org/...post__p__959730
Is ist possible to set it active without booting in loops to winre?? Or is it just active because he booted to winre (thats what i expect, as he start with: "I'm booting into WinRE from and hidden partition."

Question2: (should work because the new active part. would be the Sys.-Res. and not the windows one!?)
Do you think when i use your suggestion to include a Sys.-Res.-Partition, will it be bootable without Windows-Partition and WITHOUT winpe to set it active manually?

Additional:
http://technet.micro...28WS.10%29.aspx
There it says: "To back up and to restore the Windows RE partition, the partition must not be hidden."
so i should set the ID to 7 before capturing or applying the recovery-partition-image?? (i want to include this, to do the recovery from DVD in case of HDD-replacement)

[Tripredacus]

Schiiwa, on 05 December 2011 - 05:32 PM, said:

Question1: (don´t think this will work)
Gremo used the 1st partition as active as u can see here:
http://www.msfn.org/...post__p__959730
Is ist possible to set it active without booting in loops to winre?? Or is it just active because he booted to winre (thats what i expect, as he start with: "I'm booting into WinRE from and hidden partition."

Question2: (should work because the new active part. would be the Sys.-Res. and not the windows one!?)
Do you think when i use your suggestion to include a Sys.-Res.-Partition, will it be bootable without Windows-Partition and WITHOUT winpe to set it active manually?

Additional:
http://technet.micro...28WS.10%29.aspx
There it says: "To back up and to restore the Windows RE partition, the partition must not be hidden."
so i should set the ID to 7 before capturing or applying the recovery-partition-image?? (i want to include this, to do the recovery from DVD in case of HDD-replacement)

1. It was marked active during install/deployment. Basically how the recovery partition works is that it is hidden. If you want to boot into it, you need to send a command that unhides it and sets it as the first boot volume. The trick is that after doing your work in WinRE, that a script or program runs to hide the partition again. ID changes to partitions do not take immediate effect, as the BIOS only reads the partition IDs during POST.

2. If you want a scenario where you have:
- System Reserved (active)
- WinRE (hidden)
- Blank partition
You will need some sort of BIOS level software to handle unhiding the partition and allow booting into it, since Windows isn't there to handle the boot request. I used the MBR.EXE program from Terabyte Unlimited in this old project:
http://www.msfn.org/...very-partition/

Additional: Yes well the public MS documentation is hard to figure out sometimes I'd agree. Basically it is telling you it can't be hidden because if it is, you won't be able to capture it with the supported tools. Sector based imaging software such as Acronis or Ghost can because they don't care if it is hidden or not.

[Schiiwa]

Tripredacus, on 06 December 2011 - 09:32 AM, said:

1. It was marked active during install/deployment. Basically how the recovery partition works is that it is hidden. If you want to boot into it, you need to send a command that unhides it and sets it as the first boot volume. The trick is that after doing your work in WinRE, that a script or program runs to hide the partition again. ID changes to partitions do not take immediate effect, as the BIOS only reads the partition IDs during POST.

Just verified the partitions on the particular Windows 7-pc ... and this is the detail of the 1st partition taken with diskpart within Windows..
Partition 1
Typ : 27
Versteckt: Ja
Aktiv : Ja
Offset in Byte: 1048576

Volume ### Bst Bezeichnung DS Typ Größe Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
* Volume 3 Recovery NTFS Partition 14 GB Fehlerfre Versteck

Now I also remembered, that I set it active when creating it. It got ID27 and was set active before I installed Windows 7!!!

Tripredacus, on 06 December 2011 - 09:32 AM, said:

2. If you want a scenario where you have:
- System Reserved (active)
- WinRE (hidden)
- Blank partition
You will need some sort of BIOS level software to handle unhiding the partition and allow booting into it, since Windows isn't there to handle the boot request. I used the MBR.EXE program from Terabyte Unlimited in this old project:
http://www.msfn.org/...very-partition/

• this cannot be 100% true, because when i format OS-Partition, it also boots to winre without any windows-tools! Just when i remove the partition, winre is un/inaccessable... Why is windows that stupid!!!
  
• I just removed the OS-partition for testing...
  
• Taking the MBR.EXE won't help me, as the WinRE is already the active partition!

Maybe I'm gonna try this partitioning or alternatively this one:
- WinRE (hidden)
- System Reserved (active)
- Windows

Tripredacus, on 06 December 2011 - 09:32 AM, said:

Additional: Yes well the public MS documentation is hard to figure out sometimes I'd agree. Basically it is telling you it can't be hidden because if it is, you won't be able to capture it with the supported tools. Sector based imaging software such as Acronis or Ghost can because they don't care if it is hidden or not.

Of course this was related to imagex. Did you try that already. I could imagine that it works also with ID27 to capture or apply an image on or from an ID27-partition *not verified*

EDIT:
The attachment is the DISKPART script i used for the last configuration! Really strange that BOOTMGR or BCD insist on the Windows-partition and deny if not presend°

Attached File(s)

•  CreatePartitions.txt (411bytes)
  Number of downloads: 1

This post has been edited by Schiiwa: 09 December 2011 - 04:19 PM

[Tripredacus]

Schiiwa, on 09 December 2011 - 04:15 PM, said:

• this cannot be 100% true, because when i format OS-Partition, it also boots to winre without any windows-tools! Just when i remove the partition, winre is un/inaccessable... Why is windows that stupid!!!
  
• I just removed the OS-partition for testing...
  
• Taking the MBR.EXE won't help me, as the WinRE is already the active partition!

The attachment is the DISKPART script i used for the last configuration! Really strange that BOOTMGR or BCD insist on the Windows-partition and deny if not presend°

Well if it boots to WinRE then something was done to change it or that it was initially created in a non-standard way. There would be no reason that the hidden partition would be unhidden and bootable after formatting the OS volume. If there is any MBR tools used to control the WinRE, formatting OS volume may not remove it, making it possible to still have the control code in that partition for WinRE.

For your script, i don't know the relevance of setting ID 0x27 so soon. The newer WinPE is fast enough to possibly detect changes in partitions, which I ran into with doing XP recovery. Usually I would only change partition IDs at the end of all my work.