How to Create a Windows 7 Recovery Partition
A Windows recovery partition is a copy of your Windows 7 operating system on a section of your hard drive. You can also create an XP recovery partition or a Vista recovery partition. You need extra hard drive space or a new drive installed on your computer and a copy of the Windows operating system. It’s recommended that you use a separate hard drive in case your primary drive crashes. You can use recovery partitions in an effort to recover hard drive data without formatting.
How to Create a Partition
This article assumes you have extra hard drive space either on your current drive or a new hard drive. You should buy a new hard drive for a recovery partition to avoid data loss in case the drive becomes damaged. The following steps show you how to set up the partition in Windows Disk Management:
Open Disk Management (type “diskmgmt.msc” in the search text box).
Right-click the extra hard drive space and select “New Simple Volume.” A wizard window opens.
Enter a size for the data recovery partition. The size is set up in megabytes, so remember that 1 gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. Click “Next.”
Choose a drive letter for your new partition and click “Next.”
Leave the default that is set to format the drive. The drive needs formatting before you can use it. Click “Finish” to complete the partition setup.
After you create the partition, copy your operating system to the new recover partition. Copy all of the files from your Windows 7 installation DVD to the partition. This also works with Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Now that the files are copied and the partition is made, you must activate the partition. In the Windows Disk Management utility, right-click the new partition letter and select “Mark partition as active.”
How to Use Bootsect on the Windows 7 Recovery Partition
Open your Windows command line (type “cmd” in the search text box). You must make the new partition bootable, and the bootsect command copies the Windows 7 boot files to the partition. Type the following into the command line to make the recovery partition bootable (the “X” drive is your boot partition):
x:
cd /boot
bootsect /nt60 X:
How to Delete the Recovery Partition
If you ever decide you don’t need the recovery partition, you can remove it using the Disk Management tool. Open Disk Management, right-click the partition letter and select “Delete.” Make sure you have the information saved and you no longer need the partition. Deleting a partition removes all information, and it is added to the “Unallocated” section in Disk Management.
