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Add Recovery Partition to Win10 Boot Menu

Found myself on an odd track this morning. I started playing with reagentc and diskpart at the command line. Next thing you know, I discover the boot prompt for the recovery partition on my Lenovo T520 isn’t working. This leads me on a quest to set things back to rights. So, I start researching how to add recovery partition to Win10 boot menu and work my way to a quick fix. It’s working once again, thanks to NeoSmart Technologies excellent EasyBCD program. A couple of contortions proved necessary, with able assistance from MiniTool Partition Wizard free (MTPW).

Use EasyBCD to Add Recovery Partition to Win10 Boot Menu

In theory, it’s incredibly easy to add this entry into the boot menu. I show this on a screen capture that populates the fields for the Portable/External Media entry at the bottom of the EasyBCD program window. Those selections should be:

  1. Type: WIM Image (Ramdisk) [Tells the PC to boot to a ramdisk image loaded from the Windows recovery image file, WinRE.wim]
  2. Name: Call it what you will (I picked Win10 Recovery because it tells it like it is)
  3. Path: Because you can’t see the whole thing here, it’s actually “X:\Recovery\WindowsRE\Winre.wim” Accessing this path is what makes MTPW necessary to use EasyBCD

To provide a new boot entry, you must provide a valid path to the image file used for booting. That’s where MTPW comes into play…

How MTPW Makes This Maneuver Possible

Simply put, you can’t use this command unless the path specification is valid. That means you must temporarily assign the target recovery partition a drive letter, so you can point to the Windows Recovery image file (WinRE.wim) that you’ll use to boot from. MTPW lets you right-click that partition easily, then select “Change Letter” from the pop-up menu that presents. Change the default “None” to an available drive letter (I used X:). Then right-click the same partition again and select “Explore” from the pop-up menu instead. Use this to navigate to the file named “Winre.wim,” as shown here:

You can use the explore data to craft a complete and valid path to the WinRE.wim used for recovery boot.
[Click image for full-sized view to enhance legibility.]

Once you’ve done this work in MPTW, you can open EasyBCD and enter a valid path string for WinRE.wim. If it works, you’ll see something like this in the “View Settings” tab for EasyBCD after you Add New Entry as shown above:

Handily, EasyBCD resolves the boot file reference into terms that don’t use a drive letter value, so they persist even when the drive letter goes away!

As your final step, jump back into MPTW, right-click the recovery partition and assign it the old default value of “None.” That’ll keep the file system from bugging you about running out of space on that partition in the future. That’s it!

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