Windows 10: Boot Up From Recovery Drive

So, I made a recovery drive on a USB. Easy enough. Now, as far as researching exactly how to get to the boot selection menu should I ever have trouble, I'm seeing like 97 different answers


What is the way to get to the boot selection menu? If there are several methods, what are they?


If it is different depending on the manufacturer, I'm on a Dell


Thanks

:)

 

Recovery Drive Doubt

I created a recovery drive usb pendrive when i bought my laptop. That time it was Win 10 Home SL. Now i upgraded it to Win 10 Pro and activated it using "illegal software". So these are the doubts which i have :

1. Can the Recovery Drive reverts Pro to Home? (Recovery Drive was created during Win 10 Home SL. So if i boot Recovery Drive it should revert back to Home. These are my thoughts)
2. Will the digital license work after downgrading ?
3. Will there be any backlash ?

P.S. After upgrading it to Pro, there was a warning saying "digital license valid for Home SL, and not for Pro". I used an "illegal software" to activate it. Also i am a newbie so please explain it step by step.

 

How does Windows boot to advanced recovery option e.g. command prompt?

- that gives me a 454 'Unexpected error' This tells me that the BCD is partially corrupted.

The commands: shutdown.exe /r /o /f /t 00
or: %SystemRoot%\System32\Cmd.exe /c reagentc /boottore&shutdown /r /f /t 00
should boot into Recovery if everything is configured correctly.
FYI, If Windows is configured correctly:

1. If Reagentc is disabled, you still can get into Recovery but with limited options.
2. If Reagentc is enabled, you'll get all options.
3. If you boot Windows using Recovery USB stick, You'll get into Recovery with couple of options missing.

Here's my suggestion if you want to try:
OPTION 1: Will save the trouble of re-install Windows.

1. Download the image of my first 3 partitions (450MB Recovery, 100 MB EFI partition, and 16MB unformatted primary)
   EFI_Boot-00-00.7z - Google Drive
2. Run Macrium and restore the image from step 1, overwriting your existing 1st three partitions, leaving C alone.
3. Delete the 490MB Recovery partition.
4. From Macrium, run fix boot problems.
5. Reboot. Open Admin command prompt then run Reagentc /info to make sure that it is enabled. If not, enable it.
   if failed to enable, reboot and try again.

OPTION 2: Assuming you've already had Windows backup with Macrium.

1. Wipe out the first 5 parttiions. (450MB, 100MB, 16MB, C Drive, 480MB)
2. Fresh install Windows 10
3. Restore C drive from backup image, run fix boot problems
4. repeat step 5 from OPTION 1 above.

 

Recovery drive does not boot

After being upgrading from W 8.1 to W 10 by HP support I followed the Microsoft's website instructions to make a recovery drive. I used an external 32GB hard drive for this purpose which previously held the recovery for W 8.1. Since I did not get any
error messages I assumed all was fine and I emptied the D:Recovery from my laptop drive as suggested by Microsoft's instructions if one desired additional drive space.

Unfortunately the recovery drive will not boot. From the boot menu I selected the USB hard drive, followed successively by the following menu selections: US keyboard; use a device; USB drive (UEFI).

This sets up a loop that goes back to the keyboard selection.

With deletion of D:Recovery I am now without a recovery option. The suggestion from a Microsoft Support Engineer to create a new recovery drive seems useless since the files to be coped to such a drive were deleted. Anyone has a real solution? Thanks.