Windows 10: Add Recovery Partition to Windows 10 Boot Menu?

Don't understand this part of your instructions:

I assigned X: to the 450MB Recovery partition. This is what EasyBCD shows:

I'm guessing I need to create the partition to place Kyhi's boot.wim on (or do I just put the entire content of his ISO there), then use EasyBCD to create a new entry that points to it? If so, how is this done?

 

If you want to add just the standard Windows recovery environment to the boot menu, you would select the Add New Entry function in EasyBCD. In the bottom half, select and/or manually enter the options shown:





If you want to use Kyhi's Recovery Tools, you have a couple of options.

You can increase the existing Recovery Partition's size to large enough to hold the boot.wim file from Kyhi's Recovery Tools. Rename boot.wim to Winre.wim and overwrite the Winre.wim in the recovery partition. You'll have to remove the existing System and Hidden attributes to do that. Do it that way and the native Windows 10 recovery environment will become Kyhi's Recovery Tools.

or you can create a separate partition to hold Kyhi's Recovery boot.wim file (and whatever else you want to store there). Then use the same add new entry function but point it to Kyhi's boot.wim file.

To boot Kyhi's Recovery Tools from the Windows boot menu you only need the boot.wim file. To boot it from the UEFI or BIOS boot menu, you need all the contents of the ISO file in the partition.

 

Thank you, in the process of doing this now. Split off a 20GB partition where I'll put Kyhi's boot.wim then add the boot entry.

Edit: Works great. Thanks again.

My boot menu now has

Windows 10 (C:\Windows) Default OS
Windows 10 Safe Mode (C:\Windows)
Kyhi-WinPE (\Windows)

with a 3 second timeout.

 

It is also possible to use the EasyBCD ISO boot facility to load Kyhi's recovery tools Win10PESE ISO from your boot menu without messing about with partitions.

Having downloaded the ISO to your disk, direct EasyBCD to the location of the file on the Add New Entry tab.





After checking that the ISO file is thoroughly defragmented, EasyBCD adds an entry to the BCD boot menu, e.g.

and adds an \NST folder to the root of your SYSTEM drive volume:





Which contains a custom .MBR file to find the ISO file on your system and then to load the WinPE image to the ramdisk at boot time.

I am not sure what the approach is on an UEFI system.

 

Not working for me. The bottom window area, Portable/External Media is greyed out so I can't select the Path on the ISO tab. The Disk Image and WinPE tabs are okay, not greyed out.





This is what I have setup so far:

 

Your computer is probably UEFI and one of the first windows you get when you start EasyBCD is:





Booting from ISO is one of the features disabled with UEFI.

 

Ah, thanks. I read that but after the first time I just click OK and ignore it.

I'm happy though as I have Kyhi's WinPE bootable off the hard drive via the boot menu now, thanks to your directions.

 

Yes, please do a tutorial. It would be a great benefit to other users.

 

1) Create a Small FAT32 > 2GB < Partition at the end of your drive

Note: You can create up to a 32GB Fat32 Partition

2) Copy ISO Files to partition

3) Run Batch File to add Bootable Partition to host Boot Menu Options

PESE_BootMenu_Option.7z

4) Batch File will ask for partition "Drive Letter" and ask you to type a "Name" for the Boot Menu Entry..

Note: Batch just runs simple windows bcdedit commands to add the boot menu option....

 

That looks good. Different than what NavyLCDR wrote. Results are the same basically but the4 process is a bit different.
Add the steps necessary to create the 2GB to 32GB partition (Minitool Partition Wizard is one way) and it would be complete.

Make it an official tutorial, similar to the ones Shawn Brink writes and I'm sure Shawn would add it to the Tutorial section.