I have an OEM Toshiba A500, came with Windows 7 Installed, I did not made the recommended recovery DVDs, as I never used them before. The HDD came partitioned into two drives C & D. A few months ago I made a new partition from the D drive and installed Windows 8.1, as dual boot. Now I uninstalled Windows 8.1, and returned the D partition back to its original size. During this operation I did not use any third party application only used the built in Windows disk manager. My question: Does this ruined the factory recovery built in? I recall reading somewhere that if the OEM hard disk partitions changed the factory recovery will not work, and is it possible to make the recovery DVDs now? I would appreciate any help very much.
What does your partition table look like? If you did not delete the factory restore partition then it is possible to get it to function normally.
if you only shrunk the recovery drive (D: most likely) and used the unused space to create a new partition, you should be okay. if you for some reason deleted or corrupted those recovery files you will be out of luck. if you find you're in need of recovery options, the best thing to do is backup your drivers on the machine using a driver backup utility--free one like those found used in pe discs not some crapware driver tool found at many driver websites--and save them to some external device. then just reinstall windows altogether from a source found here on the boards. There's very little benefit most of the time to using the preinstalled vendor applications on a machine other than vendor specific drivers.
Yopu can try booting to the recovery. If you can boot to it than it should work. Also, why not try making the usb backup of it now. That should still work too.
Thank you very much gentlemen for your answers Skaendo, My partition table now back the way it was, one partition without a letter and C & D. Stayboogy That is exactly what I did and never touched the factory recovery partition, which is the one without a letter assigned to it, if I understand right. Flipp3r I tried that at boot time (F8) but a massage popped up saying "the program you are trying to run can not start". Can you see any way to fix this. Thank you all for your help
Why bother with the old outdated probably full of crapware OEM image? Just install plain Win xx & have it nice & clean sebus
I do agree with you sebus that it was full of crapware, but I can not afford a new Windows now, and Windows 10 is not clear yet how it is going to materialize, might end up like Windows 8. Flipp3 I tried holding 0 and power on but it did not work, the normal boot screen with F2 for setup and F12 for boot options appeared. I guess I will follow your advice and make the DVDs. Thank you all for your help.
assign a drive letter to the partition that does not have one assigned from disk management. then list the files that are present. also, are there any files on the D: parition at all then? typically all that is present on the drive without a letter are the boot files for loading the recovery system and a few tools for diagnostics. the actual recovery is usually on the second labeled drive (in your case D. and no one said anything about "buying" windows... just download an iso from one of the many links here on the boards, download daz's loader, install, activate, done.
stayboogy there is a file named HDDRecovery on D: partition which is the recovery related one as per the attached picture. Spoiler Though the drive and the file is still there it does not work when I try at boot as I mentioned, i can not understand why?
Directory listing of said folder would be better so we can actually see format of recovery file or files.
GUID identifier of the partition changed when you changed the partition size so it's not able to find it. again, probably best to scrap it altogether anyway. or make your recovery disks from within windows
I'll tell you why. It's because the manufacturer installs a modified master boot record(MBR) that allows the system to boot from a recovery partition that is flagged with the partition identifier 17h(hidden NTFS) instead of the normal identifier 7h(Windows System NTFS).When you installed Windows 8.1 and created a dual boot system, the MBR of the disk was altered. Sometimes this has no effect on how system recovery works, and sometimes it does. In the past, I found this was the case with a couple of Dell laptops I worked on where people had installed Linux to dual boot with Windows and ran into the very same problem. How to fix it? I honestly can't tell you, since I have no experience in writing to/modifying the MBR and getting the system to boot from the recovery partition. The way I see it, you have two choices: 1.) Create a set of recovery DVDs using Toshiba's installed recovery software, then use them to re-install the system to day one condition(already mentioned). Go to Toshiba's support website and find out how to do this. 2.) Backup/save your Windows 7 activation key and the manufacturer's digitally signed certificate to some form of external media, then do a clean install Windows 7 using one of the .iso files that you can download from a link or torrent found on this website(also already mentioned). Then you can activate Windows offline using your saved certificate and activation key. Afterward, go to Toshiba's support website to download any missing/needed drivers or software. In either case, be sure to backup all of your personal files first.
Since it's UEFI, the Recovery & Tools Partition would have id set to "DE94BBA4-06D1-4D40-A16A-BFD50179D6AC" (Recovery) & gpt attributes set to 0x8000000000000001 (Hidden). For MBR, I think you mean 27h, not 17h...
Where exactly did you see UEFI mentioned? Not by me, and not by the OP either. He stated "I have an OEM Toshiba A500, came with Windows 7 Installed . . . The HDD came partitioned into two drives C & D. A few months ago I made a new partition from the D drive and installed Windows 8.1, as dual boot. Now I uninstalled Windows 8.1 . . ." If you do a Google search "Toshiba A500 review", you'll see that most of the reviews are dated circa 2009-2010. Back then, any OEM machine shipping with Windows 7 pre-installed used MBR boot. It wasn't until the release of Windows 8 in October 2012 that Microsoft mandated that the OEM's adopt UEFI capable BIOS on their machines if they wanted to sell them with Windows 8 pre-installed. I'll admit you're correct about 27h being the partition identifier for a hidden recovery partition. The partition identifier 17h is used for the Windows 7 System Reserved partition, which is also hidden from the system. My bad for confusing the two.
This is a rich discussion, I have learned a lot from the good experienced members that participated. Clearly from the opinion given the way forward for me is to make the set of backup DVDs from inside Windows, backup my activation, though I have the key sticker still, then go for the pain of clean install. One last question does UEFI allow changing partition sizes, or is it still the manufacturer setup the HDD.
The key on the sticker is OEM:COA key that is not the key that was used to pre-install your system it was OEM:SLP key. To be honest no need to backup your certificate and key just use Daz loader to install key and certificate, the loader itself wil not be installed since you have slic 2.1 in bios.
Rich discussion? Largely a waste of electrons imho. Forget the recovery partition, install clean using an MSDN iso, and then use the appropriate certificate + serial for oem_slp activation.
Hello dabour - If it were me, I would try to create the set of recovery DVDs first. Using them would set your machine back to "day-one" condition, meaning that your original partition setup would be restored to the disk. Any and all Windows updates would have to be applied afterward, and any of your existing software applications would have to be re-installed as well. Make a list of these now so you don't overlook any later. Naturally, backup all of your personal data files, and don't forget to backup your browser's bookmarks as well. If the above doesn't work, then you'll have to consider re-installing Windows from scratch using an .iso. Make sure that it's the same version that is already installed on your machine. In order to backup your Windows 7 activation, you can use the Advanced Tokens Manager by Josh Cell Softwares. Since I don't have 20 posts, I cannot provide you with a direct link. Just do a Google search to find it. In addition to all of the things I mentioned above, you'll have to visit Toshiba's support website to download and install any missing drivers after doing the installation.