I am trying to understand how booting works with a Recovery partition. In the past when I have restored a Windows partition using GParted with a copy that I made earlier, I needed to use a Windows recovery disc to repair the partition because it would not boot.
Now I have done the same process again, except this time Windows boots immediately after with need to do a repair with a Windows disc. The difference that I notice is that with this laptop, the boot flag is on an ntfs partition called Recovery. I assume that this must be the reason why it is able to boot without a repair.
Can anyone explain to me what is happening here?
Best Answer
Source: GParted manual
Boot is just a... flag.
Yes, because restoring the partition probably didn't restore a working bootloader.
Newer Windows versions (I guess 7 and 8, 8.1) install the bootloader on a separate partition, which is automatically created when you make the first partition on an unformatted HDD. Because the bootloader was intact, it looked for a partition with the
boot
flag and started the boot process from it.