Factory recovery - Create a Custom Recovery Partition  

Great tutorial. It explains how to create a recovery partition that restores to a speical image that contains the users and apps tp added to the base W10. Over time you are surely going to add/dlete apps and also update your w10.
SO what you really want is a default recover partition that is like the USB recovery disk but with the convenience of being on you boot disk and not have to look for the USB or etc and then restore from the last backup you did. Over time you would periodically do more changes and perform further backups.

While this tutorial matches in creating a customer factory--like restore, such a restore is less usefull than what I describe above.

Would this work in the way, when you go to the option in Windows - Reset this PC - can it reset it back to the image we created?

Many thanks
Jack

Hello,
I've been using the method given here for creating custom recovery partition for a few years, and it's worked great, until recently.

The issue I'm having currently, is the Recovery partition doesn't work correctly in UEFI installations. It works fine in Legacy installation, but when I boot Recovery partition from a UEFI install, setup complains it cannot find the Windows installation media and asks me to install a driver.

It should be noted, I am removing the drive letter from my recovery partition during OOBE setup. To do this, I'm running a powershell script from the special "SetupComplete.cmd' script. It's a very simple script:

Code:

$Partition = Get-Volume -FileSystemLabel "RECOVERY" | Get-Partition
Remove-PartitionAccessPath -DiskNumber $Partition.DiskNumber -PartitionNumber $Partition.PartitionNumber -AccessPath "$($Partition.DriveLetter):"

So the final install has the recovery partition hidden. I'm pretty sure this is what is blowing things up, but it does work fine in Legacy installs, only UEFI goes south.

Been struggling to figure out what the malfunction is for a few weeks now, but I'm pretty much stumped. Anyone got any tips here? Either to get it work again with my current hiding procedure, or how to properly hide the recovery partition so it still works?

Good morning, at least here :) question , I am wondering if I can use this recovery ? as i am using another of Kari's great ideas and have relocated my user data to a second drive.

all thoughts appreciated

Ken

Kari said:

Script in step 3.1 is automated pretty much as far as it could be. The sample script / batch file is specifically for GPT partitioned system disk.

I am not sure, if I get your point?




You have relocated the Users folder to another disk. When you capture the system (Windows) disk to a WIM file, and use it to restore Windows, what happens is what's highlighted in below extraxt from information shown at the beginning of the tutorial:

...

When restoring Windows from this custom recovery partition, Windows is updated (as it was when image was captured), containing all pre-installed software, user accounts and user data, device drivers, custom settings like themes and so on.

Most software, when installed, add general application specific settings for all users in a folder in ProgramData folder, so called "AppData for all users", on Windows system disk, and user specific settings in AppData folders in individual user profile folders.

When application is run, it gets the general, all users settings from ProgramData, and user specific settings from AppData.

In your case (as well as mine!), the user specific AppData is not on disk to be restored using this method (ProgramData on system disk, in WIM file, and AppData on another disk). AppData might be changed since the recovery WIM was captured, and will not be restored.

However, this will not be a problem when the WIM is used to restore Windows. In worst case scenario, AppData will contain some obsolete entries, changes since the WIM was captured, but that will in no way cause issues.

When restored from custom WIM, system still finds the user specific AppDataon that other disk. In addition, all personal user data and files will remain intact, all documents and files created or edited even after the WIM was captured still there.

Short: no problems!

Kari

thank you Kari, that is the confirmation I was looking for

Ken

I've been using this tutorial successfully for a few years to image my old Samsung laptop but now have a problem using it on my Dell XPS.........

I had the disk swapped out by Dell under warranty a couple of days ago so have had to relaod and customise all my Win10 settings. I now have the laptop in a state that I want to do a system image so have started running through this tutorial but have pretty much become stuck at the first step......

When I change the boot order to boot from a Win10 install USB it boots into the Windows Setup region and keyboard
selection screen fine and I can get to the command prompt with shift + F10.

However, when I start DISKPART and use the LIST VOLUME command the only thing listed is the USB drive, there's no sign of the SSD with windows on it, screenshot attached.



Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers


PS - if this is posted in the wrong place can one of the Mods move it? Thanks