Factory recovery - Create a Custom Recovery Partition  

RMiguel said:

Hi there, this is really helpfull, i have one Asus laptop thats comes with a hidden partition for factory recovery, the thing is this partition is 25Gb FAT32 partition, my doubt is should i keep it FAt32 or need to format it in NFTS(considering FAT32 file size limit sinde i dont know if there is any file that would be bigger then 4gb)? also my disk is MBR is that helps also.

As it is a vendor partition for recovery, there is no need to change it to NTFS. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

RMiguel said:

Asking because that partition is used to factory recovey back to windows 7 and i want to replace the recovery with windows 10, i have it backed up to 5 DVD's and tested already if i ever need it.

Note: other members might object the following recommendation. It is only my personal, subjective opinion about what you should do.

Having checked that your DVD recovery set works, store the disks in a safe place. Format the current recovery partition, NTFS file system, and assign it a drive ID letter, then use it to create your own Windows 10 recovery media on that partition as told in this tutorial.

One minor thing, not an issue but something you might want to do: You told that the current recovery partition is 25 GB. It is at least 5 to 10 GB bigger than needed for your own recovery media. If you want to free the unused space, you can shrink that partition when your recovery media is created and you can see how much space is needed.

However, usually those recovery partitions are last on the disk. You cannot shrink a partition "backwards" with native Windows Disk Management tool, in other words free space on it to give more space for partition before it. For that you must use a third party partitioning tool like MiniTool Partition Wizard.

vgkfan83 said:

I want to do this and create my own recovery, but gee whiz, this may be way above my expertise.

Following the instructions in tutorial step by step, the procedure is really easy, straight forward.

Kari

vgkfan83 said:

How long does the "Saving Image" part last?

If you mean how long it takes to capture the custom install.wim as told in step 1.10, it is impossible to tell because it depends on several different factors like your hardware setup, size of Windows installation to be captured and so on.

I've done some testing. I clean installed Windows 10 PRO version 1803 on two different laptops, a low end Asus with slow 5400 RPM hard disk and an i5 processor, and a quite nice HP laptop with an SSD disk and mid-range i7 processor.

I set up both laptops exactly the same way, set up same user accounts, copied same content to user profile folders, installed exactly the same software, and captured Windows to custom install.wim file. On both laptops, the captured WIM file was almost the same size, just under 9 GB.

Low-end Asus needed almost an hour to capture image, HP did it in less than half an hour.

The less software and user data your Windows installation contains, and the more powerful hardware you have are the main factors to get image captured relatively fast.

To make image smaller and capture faster, I recommend using Disk Cleanup first to remove all temporary files (tutorial) then unlinking OneDrive if it is set up (tutorial). After image has been captured, you can then re-link it again.

The best (and fastest) would of course be that you capture the custom WIM straight after a clean install, only installing the software you want to be included in image, updating Windows fully and setting up user accounts, then capturing the image before any user data has been added.

Kari