Creating A Media Less Recovery / Installation Partition

After purchasing my new Student Version of Windows 7 Professional I was keen to do a full system format, and start fresh. I no longer had a need for the Dell Recovery Partition which contained Vista (and a decent amount of bloatware), so I removed all partitions from my disk to start with a blank 180GB HDD.

I thought to myself, if I am going to start fresh I might as well do things right and mimic Dell’s setup with a recovery partition of my own. Now to be fair, this isn’t an extremely wild idea as there are plenty of manufacturers and software companies who provide such solutions very simple and easy. Everyone knows that Norton Ghost is fantastic, and Acronis TrueImage is right there with them. Of course you can simply run-up Imagex along with WinPE and sysprep a WIM to re-image your HDD at anytime for a free solution.

However, all these solutions require that you have some sort of recovery media for boot time operation, and the Imagex solution isn’t for the faint of heart. Now I do a lot of travel, and I wanted a solution that didn’t require me to look after a bootable DVD or USB stick, and because I am working with a laptop I didn’t have second disk which I could boot from via BIOS settings. My recovery solution had to be a Primary Partition on my only HDD with boot time options (in case my system is completely rooted.)

This turned out to be quite the challenge, as Windows 7 / Vista no longer support the simple easy boot.ini file that allows you to manually adjust boot time parameters. Instead Windows 7 / Vista have moved onto some fancy form of bootsect / BCD (Boot Configuration Data) which is very difficult to edit manually. Thankfully all of my hard work paid off and I now have a self sufficient system with all the diagnostics and re-imaging tools I could ever need. And thanks to Windows 7’s new Backup and Restore options, I was also able to include a system image which contained all of my settings and applications so that I don’t have to sit through 10 hours of Windows Update again.

What I ended up with is a Primary partition on my HDD that is a full and complete bootable version of the Windows 7 installation media. When I choose this partition at boot time it is exactly as if I have inserted the Windows 7 Install DVD into my disk drive! I can utilise all of the tools in the Windows Recovery Console (which includes the option to restore from a previously created system image), or I can simply re-install Windows 7 from scratch - without affecting my restore partition or boot menu variables!