Windows 10: Windows Installation / Sysprep - Recovery Partition at Beginning of Drive

I've done reference images for a while now for my company - and whenever I've setup a VM on ESXi of Windows 10, and installed it on a 30GB partition, then ran my stuff and closed it out and sysprepped - the recovery partition always started the drive - layout was

1. recovery
2. system
3. msr
4. OS

This works while sysprep is going because the OS partition gets resized automatically depending on the size of the drive its being deployed to during the 'getting things ready' stage of Win10 bootup.

Upon creating my 2004 reference image, I have countless errors and issues using the exact same process as years past, because the machines I was deploying to never grew more than 29.3GB.

Turns out, recovery was partition 4. Because its in the way, sysprep's <extendospartition>true couldn't perform anything.

After looking back at my own setups, and stock installs, it seems that this happened relatively randomly. My personal laptop? recovery is 4. My 1903 and 1909 image? recovery is 1. The 20 installs of 2004 I've done to test? Recovery on 4. :shrugs

Any ideas on how to force recovery to the beginning again? I realize MS 'prefers' if you put it at the end, but for sysprep purposes I don't want it there. I could just delete it altogether but as these end up being computers supported by me, I'd prefer to have recovery just for ease of support.

Also, I do not use MDT/WDS. I use FOG Project to capture and deploy images and have no reason to want to switch as FOG works for my usecase.

submitted by /u/p4ch0m3
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:)

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

How To: Create recovery partition.

it worked when i copied all the files of the disk to the recovery partition i created, but i had to use WinPE tab to add the entry.

Type: WIM Image (Ramdisk)
Name: Recovery
Path: Z:\Sources\boot.wim
and hit Add Entry
I tried it in VirtualBox and it worked.
At first, it would add a second "Windows 7" entry to the list, but when the installation is finished, the old one is deleted. (I formatted only C: partition)

 

Help with HP System Recovery partition

I will try and cut this short:

So i have this HP pavilion DV5-1987 laptop, that came with windows vista home premium 32bit. A couple of months later i installed a 64bit version, and about a week ago i installed Windows 7 x64 RTM. Both installations was a fresh install on the C partition, leaving the recovery partition intact and alone.
Now i have regrettet and want the original os to be reinstalled. But it doesnt work.
The bios options does nothing, i press ESC to get to boot options, choose F11 for boot to recovery partition, and it goes straight to windows 7.
i search the internet for options and try these suggestions:
Mark drive D as active partition (the rec partition). it still boots to win 7.
boot to super grub from a boot cd, and press "AUTO MAGIC BOOTER" (something like that). it then shows me two identical "vista boot loader" to choose from, and both goes into win 7, and a third (other OS) that gives me and error and returns to grub loader.

there a several other suggestions but either they wont work in my scenario or are another iteration of what i have already tried.

So uh... help? please? if you need anymore information please ask.