x509 Posted May 9, 2018 Report Share Posted May 9, 2018 (edited) My systems all run Windows 10 Pro. Do I need to back up the 450 MB Recovery Partition or the 16 MB "Other" partition? I think the latter is related to the fact that the drive is GPT-formatted. If yes for later, do I need to assign a drive letter to these partitions, or is there a way for Retrospect to detect them without drive letters? I'm concerned because about two months ago I needed to restore my main system after a bad Windows crash. I recreated the Windows 10 partition, restored tghe entire contents of my C: drive, but I was unable to reboot the system from that restored C: drive. Edited May 9, 2018 by x509 add another sentence to explain Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted May 9, 2018 Report Share Posted May 9, 2018 1 hour ago, x509 said: I'm concerned because about two months ago I needed to restore my main system after a bad Windows crash. I recreated the Windows 10 partition, restored tghe entire contents of my C: drive, but I was unable to reboot the system from that restored C: drive. Did you follow the instructions in the manual for a "bare metal restore"? You wrote that you you recreated the Windows 10 partition. Just the (empty) partition? You didn't install Windows 10 on it? Do you have another boot drive in your computer, that you used when restoring? On all PCs I have seen, there are drive letters for the recovery partitions and they are backed up. I think they usually have Y as the drive letter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x509 Posted May 9, 2018 Author Report Share Posted May 9, 2018 I wasn't doing a bare metal restore, because I had not created the recovery media in advance. I'm going to do that as soon as I can. Before I did that install, I did a fresh install of Windows. I don't remember for sure, but I think I was trying to restore to the active boot partition. Are you saying that I should have installed Retrosect on another boot volume (which I do have on my system), and used that to drive the restore? I don't have drive letters for the recovery partitions, but I am going to add drive letters (Y: seems like a good choice), right now. x509 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scillonian Posted May 9, 2018 Report Share Posted May 9, 2018 1 hour ago, x509 said: I wasn't doing a bare metal restore, because I had not created the recovery media in advance. I'm going to do that as soon as I can. Before I did that install, I did a fresh install of Windows. I don't remember for sure, but I think I was trying to restore to the active boot partition. Are you saying that I should have installed Retrosect on another boot volume (which I do have on my system), and used that to drive the restore? If you don't have the Disaster Recovery media a good way to proceed would be: Install Windows 10 If this is the Backup Server install Retrospect If this is a Client install Retrospect Client Run the Restore. 29 minutes ago, x509 said: I don't have drive letters for the recovery partitions, but I am going to add drive letters (Y: seems like a good choice), right now. If this is the default Recovery partition created by Windows Setup then you won't be able to assign a drive letter to it. This partition contains the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) which is also on Windows Setup media. Foe more information have a look at these two Microsoft documents about the default Windows partition scheme: BIOS/MBR-based hard drive partitions UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions These documents are intended for OEMs on best practice for partitioning disks. However Windows Setup on the Windows 10 media downloaded from Microsoft does not follow these guidelines. For a clean install it creates a System partition large enough to include the Windows Recovery Environment (that would be in the Recovery partition according to the guidelines), an MSR partition on UEFI/GPT systems, and a Windows partition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scillonian Posted May 9, 2018 Report Share Posted May 9, 2018 14 hours ago, Lennart_T said: On all PCs I have seen, there are drive letters for the recovery partitions and they are backed up. I think they usually have Y as the drive letter. My experience is this is true for systems from OEMS (Dell, HP, etc) where they also include drivers and other software on this partition along with the custom install image. For installations using the vanilla Microsoft setup media this partition only holds the Windows Recovery Environment and is hidden. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x509 Posted May 10, 2018 Author Report Share Posted May 10, 2018 My desktops are home-built, and my laptop is Lenovo, but the recovery partition did not have a drive assigned. Even if it had, the "Lenovo extras" are mostly bloatware which I had to blow off anyway. So I guess I don't need to assign a drive letter to the recovery partitions and waste space on my backup drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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