Steps to Create Factory Default Dedicated Recovery Partition in Windows

So it all started when I decided to upgrade my Windows 8 laptop to Windows 10. The installation failed and what I was left with was a laptop that had no OS, since Win 8 was removed and Win 10 wasn’t installed.

I decided to do a clean installation of Windows 10 now, but for that I had to delete and format my hard disk which means losing my factory default Windows recovery partition. Well, whatever be the case, using the below freeware you can also create your own dedicated Recovery Partition in Windows 7, 8 or 10 (both 32 and 64 bits).

The software is called as AOMEI OneKey Recovery. Although it is more of a paid software but it also comes in a free version with limited features but enough for us to create a recovery partition. Do note here that by recovery partition I mean, a dedicated drive on your hard disk that can come useful in case of system crash or issues (I don’t mean any bootable CD or USB recovery drive).

Important Points to note before proceeding

• You won’t see any new drive in your My Computer section but your primary drive will show something around 20GB less of memory space. This is because this software keeps the current state of the Windows in it’s own memory and uses its own recovery feature to recover the system.

• You will see a prompt every time you boot up your computer that will ask you if you want to recover your system or not, by pressing F11 or A (the key that you setup). This prompt will stay for 3 seconds and if you are using the free edition of the software then you won’t be able to reduce the time or hide the prompt.

Step 1:

Download and install the AOMEI OneKey Recovery software.

Step 2:

Click on OneKey System Backup option to backup the current state of the system as a new partition. Do note here that this software doesn’t affect your files/data but I would advise you to have your own backup created just in case.

OneKey System recovery is for recovering from the backups already created.

Step 3:

Proceed with the selected (Recommended) option that is to backup system to AOMEI OneKey Recovery Partition.

This is required to provide the backup location, which is going to be a dedicated partition in our case.

Step 4:

Now as a part of the process you will need to select the drive. Since I had only one drive in the laptop, I selected that and clicked the “Start Backup” button.

Step 5:

Partition creation and backup process will start and your computer will reboot as a part of the process.

Step 6:

Just wait for the process to complete and the confirmation box to show “System Backup is completed successfully”.

The whole process took me around 15-16 minutes but it will vary depending on your system speed and data to be backed up.

Below is the screenshot of my disk partitions (you can see yours by going in Disk Management) and as you can see AOMEI has reserved something around 19 GB of memory for creation of the recovery partition.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.