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Create a Bootable Hidden Recovery Partition on Windows 8.1

Latest update on by Aoife McCambridge .

Most new desktops machines and laptops, nowadays ship with pre-installed systems and some come with a special on boot option to recover or to maintain the installed system. Even if your device does not have this feature or if you have lost yours for some reason, in this short article, we'll explain how to make your own first recovery partition, configure your boot settings to post a boot option to launch a boot from this partition, and following that how to hide it.

Requirements

your windows installation DVD or ISO.
EaseUS Free Partition Manager
EasyBCD a dual-boot tool. 
Free only for home users

Preparing your HDD Partition map.

in This example made on a clean windows installation using EaseUS Free Partition Manager, what I basically did is that I partitioned the HDD as follows:

SN size type label
1 350 mb Primary fs=NTFS System
2 20 gb Primary fs=NTFS OS
3 15 gb Primary fs=NTFS Recovery
4 15 gb Logical fs=NTFS my stuff

After creating the partitions as mentioned above, simply copy all the content of the windows DVD to the "Recovery" partition.
Launch the diskmgmt.msc and remove the drive letter for the DVD drive and data partition.

Partition sizes are up to you to decide, this is just an example as recovery will follow the size of data you intend to have on it. However, the neat order for our project is to start with bitlocker 350 mb partition followed with your main partition on which windows will be installed, followed by the recovery partition and after all that you can put your data partition.

Preparing Recovery Media with personalized options.

As you are making a recovery partition, it would be useful to lend your self a hand.
In our case here, we are saving the original installation files from the win 8.1 DVD, so we can benefit from an unattended installation, which will free us from:

  • making the installation fully automated with pre-defined options.
  • install windows with your devices drivers merged and installed.
  • tweaked version of windows.

you can use: Win Toolkit for the job.

Deploying the boot option for the recovery partition.

Assuming that you did install EasyBCD, launch it as administrator and follow:



Wrapping up Session

Now it's time to hide the Recovery partition and re-assign letters to other drives:
run EaseUS Free Partition Manager

After hiding the partition, run diskmgmt.msc and reassign letters to your drives that we removed their letter previously.
now when you start-up your machine it will display this screen for 3 seconds

When you choose recover windows 8.1 - 64 bit
it will boot to your hidden partition.

Enjoy !!!

Image: ©123RF.com

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This document, titled « Create a Bootable Hidden Recovery Partition on Windows 8.1 », is available under the Creative Commons license. Any copy, reuse, or modification of the content should be sufficiently credited to CCM (ccm.net).

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