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Create a Bootable Hidden Recovery Partition - Windows 8.1

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Bootable Hidden Recovery Partition

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 has this feature or if you lost yours for any reason, in this short How-To 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 after that we'll 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
1350 mbPrimary fs=NTFSSystem
220 gbPrimary fs=NTFSOS
315 gbPrimary fs=NTFSRecovery
415 gbLogical fs=NTFSmy stuff

after creating the partitions like I mentioned, I just copied all the content of my windows DVD to the "Recovery" partition.
launched the diskmgmt.msc and just removed the drive letter for my DVD drive and data partition.

partition sizes are up to you to decide it's just an example, 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 hand your self a treat !!
in our case here we are saving the original installation files from the win 8.1 DVD, so we can take benefit of unattended installation, which will free our hands 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 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 !!!
Jean-François Pillou

Jean-François Pillou - Founder of CCM
Better known as Jeff, Jean-François Pillou is the founder of CommentCaMarche.net. He is also CEO of CCM Benchmark and digital director at the Figaro Group.

Learn more about the CCM team

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