keystroke booting

[tobyhughes]

Hi,

I have a WINPE recovery partition and want to be able to press a key on boot e.g. F10 like with major OEMs and it will boot it, and it will not be on the boot menu. How do i do this?

[submix8c]

Only played with this for a short while (probably not helpful at all...) -

The recovery partition is initially the C: drive (active partition) and the drive letters are "reversed" after recovery (C: becomes D: and D: becomes C: and Active). This "magic" is done by i-don't-know-exactly-how. Usually there is some kind of proprietary Boot code involved with recovery.

I can tell you this - I "restored" a friend's Compaq back to "factory" by deleting the C: drive and setting the remaining drive to Active and rebooting. The PE Recovery Partition then allowed for a Restore. (did this because the Create Restore CD's option was gorked up and the computer was being re-sold as Factory-Reset".

Any particular reason for wanting the Recover Partition bootable? The only method I can think of to "force a boot" to it is to use Diskpart to set the Active Partition to the Recovery Partition instead of the already-installed-partition...

note - this was done on an XP Home PC... Vista may be a different beastie. OEM's are notorious for using "stunts" to prevent pirating in addition to MS OEM requirements...

Edited December 27, 2007 by submix8c

[jaclaz]

Here is some info:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Creating-WinPE-b...on-t106822.html

Particularly this one should be what you are looking for:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=18480

An OLD related thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=47773

jaclaz