Basically, you could use SD card instead of shrinking C: and making a temporary partition on HDD / SSD, possible problem being exactly as you mentioned not knowing if when booted to Command Prompt SD card driver is loaded. Another possible issue is does the touchscreen work when booting to Command Prompt.
Easy to test, though. Boot to Command Prompt and see if touch works. If not, just hard reset the device. If touch works, use DISKPART to see if SD card is shown.
Kari
Thanks Kari. Looks like a lot of time and effort went into this like most of your tutorials. Well laid out and easy to follow.
Most tablets will not boot from an SD card, but you can usually see it ok even from a winpse session e.g. Macrium Reflect. I have never needed to install any drivers for them.
As you say, it is important to have drivers saved for tablets in particular, or else upon reinstallation of Windows, the drivers may be missing as they use special drivers, in particular touchscreen and rotation sensors.
Many have clean installed, and found they need to attach a usb mouse /keyboard via an OTG cable/hub to use device. Unfortunately many cheap tablet vendors do not put the drivers on the web, and unless you can find a kind soul who will send you the drivers, you can be totally out of luck.
One day without thinking, I clean installed Windows 10 on a tablet without explicitly saving drivers. Even us Gurus can screw up now and then!
Rather than trying to find them on the web, I had fortunately made a Macrium image backup of old installation (automatic reflex reaction). I simply mounted that as a drive, and was able to install drivers by pointing to driver directories in image backup.
Incidentally, I recently made a post on the Backup sub forum about some tests I did a few days ago making image backups of a 32bit UEFI tablet with the various main free players (Aoemi, Paragon, Macrium, Easesus, Veeam, Windows and even Clonezilla (which failed but I did not report).
Only two of them, Macrium Reflect and Easeus Todo Backup were successful with the rest failing miserably. Macrium was five times faster than Easeus though. You might want to add a note to your Macrium Backup tutorial to state that it is the only tool that works on such devices where other fail or are very slow.
One would use DISM to add the Touch Drivers to the Boot.wim, Install.wim or winre.wim to have the required touch driver support
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