You have two options here. You could create a new boot entry, with the correct options for the boot entry (in particular, WinPEMode
and RecoveryOS
). Alternatively, you could fix your existing boot entry to point to the correct location.
Most BCD editing tools don't show the recovery entries for whatever reason. It is possible to edit those entries through the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\BCD00000000\Objects\
), but that could get confusing quite quickly. Visual BCD Editor does display recovery entries, among others, in a friendly view.
I've personally gone through a similar process, and have more detailed steps here. You could either fix the existing entries as I did, or add a new entry with the correct options as seen in the screenshots on the linked answer. I have not tested adding a new entry, and am unsure if it will work or not.
Likely differences from the solution in that answer are as follows:
The first thing to do is make sure you edit the recovery entry the main OS entry's RecoverySequence
points to. This is the one that will be loaded on startup.
The ApplicationDevice
and OSDevice
options must point to the location of the Windows Recovery Environment's image (.wim
). For me, this is a 169,213,970 byte
file called Winre.wim
. Since you shuffled the partitions, it's likely the path is already there but the drive letter is missing. You must identify which partition contains the appropriate path and files. On a normal Windows installation, this is the main OS drive (C:
).
I can see HP_Recovery partition in Windows and there I can find some *.wim files. For instance E:\Recovery\WindowsRE\winre.wim 160MB file is there.
That is likely the correct image. In your case, those options should have the drive letter set to E:
.
I'm not sure WinRE can be loaded from a logical/extended partition. It's worth a try, otherwise you should probably restore the recovery partition back to a primary one. Or you could even try copying the image into the main OS partition. The worst that should happen is a failure to boot into the RE.
Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8 computes partition identifier as 32-bit disk signature (found in MBR) + 64-bit partition offset (in bytes, from the start of the disk).
Partition identifier of Windows System Root Partition is stored in BCD (\Boot\BCD registry hive and \Boot\BCD.LOG registry log) and also in mount manager database (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices), physically stored in \Windows\System32\Config\SYSTEM and \Windows\System32\Config\SYSTEM.LOG.
So partition identifier of disk C: will change after your manipulations. Usually Windows is able to repair itself at boot time, but if it won't, you can fix both references using Emergency Boot CD, Mount & Boot Center: http://www.prime-expert.com/ebcd/
Best Answer
Removing the assigned drive letter will stop these warnings.
They are only appearing because you gave the drive a letter and you really don't need to care what is on a 500MB partition on a 1TB disk.
In the same way you added a drive letter to it you can remove the drive letter. Just right click the drive in the disk management console, and in the "assign drive letter" dialog you simply remove the letter assigned to it. You don't need to care about what's on that drive, you are giving (some of the crappiest) malware access to critical system recovery files and quite frankly seeing that drive is a waste of a perfectly good drive letter.
Chances are that the data on that partition is minor, only used when doing a system restore and given the size of it is not even a full system image. It is probably just a couple of drivers that Windows will ignore as a latest copy will have newer versions.
The data on it probably "increased" because you gave it a drive letter and during installation of something Windows created a restore point and used the space.
You don't need to know what is on that disk, Windows probably will never use it again, and it's too small to care about recovering.