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Tripredacus, I wanted to thank you for your help. When I asked the question, I didn't understand Windows enough to ask the question properly. I've learned so much in the last few days and I believe I understand what's going on now. The instructions you posted work fine. The problem was with the /bootkey option. I thought that I could somehow boot into the Windows Recovery Environment using F10 during POST but I now believe I need a third party program to do this. I think the WinRE requires files on the OS partition (like maybe winload.exe?) I know when I boot the PC, I can hit F8, I see the Recovery stuff, and I can recovery Windows. Thanks for all the help! I'm going to consider my original goal accomplished for now. Thanks!

I feel like I'm missing something. Like I should be using BCDEdit as well as ReAgentC. I just can't figure out what to do with BCDEdit. If I can't get this soon, I think I'm just going to tell the customer he's going to have to just use the thumb drive to reinstall. It kind of sucks, I think it'd be great, as in a personal triumph, if I could figure this out. It's become more of a personal challenge at this point in time. I just hate to have to give up on something.

This is what I was attempting to accomplish. I thought I had the partitions setup in such away, where if the OS partition was destroyed, people could still boot into WinRE and then reinstall Windows. My AutoUnattend.xml answer file didn't work. Seems like the script wasn't even written. So, this is what I did. I PXE boot into WinPE. I delete the 500MB System partition and the OS partition and then recreate them using DiskPart. I use imagex to apply my custom install.wim to the OS partition (drive D:). Then I use BCDBoot D:\Windows /s C: to create the store on the System Partition (drive C:). I then run the two ReAgentC commands. When I hit F10 to boot into the WinRE environment, BOOTMGR is missing. I use BCDEdit /store C:\Boot\BCD /enum ALL to list the stuff in the store. It doesn't point to my WinRE.wim or my Install.Wim file at all though. It doesn't point to any. ReAgentC /Info /Target D:\Windows shows the proper data though. But BCDEdit /store C:\Boot\BCD /enum ALL doesn't list my WinRE.wim at all! Is it possibly that ReAgentC or something is messing with the BCD Store on the PXE Server?

I think what the main problem is Reagentc.exe isn't updating the BCD store. After I run it, when I execute BCDEdit /ENUM ALL, I see everything is still pointing to WinRE on the OS's partition in the \Recovery\{GUID} directory. The way I run Reagentc is after 7 is installed, I hit F8, boot into Recovery, pick the command prompt and run the command. Maybe I shouldn't be running it from there. I'm trying something new. In WSIM (Windows System Image Manager), in the answer file, I created a Synchronous RunCommand during the OOBE phase, after first login. I have a cmd script that copies install.wim, WinRE.wim and boot.sdi to the recovery partition and then run the ReAgentc command. Perhaps this will work. If I can just get WinRE setup on the Recovery partition and have it recognize install.wim, I'll call this done. It'd be nice if this new way I'm trying it works. Then I can just deploy the images and it'll automatically set everything up and save me some time in the future.

I thought the purpose of the bootkey was in case something happened to the OS partition. I thought the idea was if the OS partition became corrupt for whatever reason, having the recovery stuff on a separate partition, you'd still be able to recover your system. I'll look into the FactoryRecoveryTool. I know, when I followed the first article, even if I didn't use the bootkey option, when I followed the directions where you go into the Control Panel, do the backup and recovery advanced options and everything, I'd get an error message saying the recovery stuff couldn't be found. Thanks for explaining this stuff to me. I really appreciate the help and everything.

Thank you. Yes, I have a few posts on technet and one of them asked some questions about setting up a recovery partition. Why do you say that the recovery method should not remove the Windows partitions and recreate them? Is it because the Windows Recovery environment relies on parts of the Windows installation (like the username / password) and isn't really designed to fully restore the PC to factory specs, just reinstall Windows when things break? I'd like it to use my custom install.wim file. Also, I have followed that article to a tee but I added the /bootkey 4400 to the last ReAgentc program so I can hit F10 during POST to boot into the recovery environment, however, when I try the F10 stuff, I get a message saying missing BOOTMGR or something. I believe I'm missing a key step here. I struggle very much with the BCDEdit stuff and I suspect I might need to use that command to setup a store on the Recovery partition. If I can automate setting up the recovery partition when 7 is deployed, I am definitely okay with it saving the OS to Windows.old. Thank you for your help.

I know this is an older post. I wanted to say I really enjoyed your instructions that you provided here. I wanted to know if you had any articles on how to actually setup a Recovery Console. I deploy Windows 7 and it creates three MBR type partitions. An active 500MB System Reserved partition, an empty 14GB recovery partition and a 133GB partition that holds the Windows 7 installation. I'm just having trouble setting up the store for the recovery partition. Currently, on the OS partition, there's a hidden Recovery directory. I'd like it so the winre.wim and boot.sdi file reside on the actual Recovery partition. When the user presses F10 during POST, I want it to start up recovery and deploy the image that I captured to reinstall the OS. I want it to delete the System Reserve and the Windows partition, recreate them, and then deploy the image to the partition containing Windows. Do you have any write ups on how to accomplish this? Thank you.