Can I use BIOS_RVY partition as System?

Timbuster

Member
I have an old Windows 7 PC that I would like to dual boot. I have a pressing need.
It has the BIOS_RVY (recovery) partition as the first partition on the drive (Primary).
I have cloned the Win 7 (OS_Install) partition onto a 3rd Primary partition, and also have two Logical partitions following that.

Clearly both OS partitions need to be 'C' drive when in use (separately of course, with the alternate one being hidden).
I have installed NeoGrub and created two Windows items in the configuration file, that hide or unhide the two partitions accordingly, but due to System being on the original Win 7 drive (partition) , I cannot use System on that while hidden, to allow booting into the cloned Win 7 drive.

So can I use the BIOS_RVY partition as System?
And if so, do I just use bcdboot.exe or some GUI element of EasyBCD 2.3 to do so?

P.S. The BIOS_RVY partition is about 9 Gb in size and half used.
 
For your interest, I have the following entries in the NeoGrub configuration file.
(not being able to find a Win 7 example of Windows dual boot, they may not be entirely correct)

# NeoSmart NeoGrub Bootloader Configuration File
#
# This is the NeoGrub configuration file, and should be located at C:\NST\menu.lst
# Please see the EasyBCD Documentation for information on how to create/modify entries:
# EasyBCD

default 0
timeout 15

title Windows 7 (main)
hide (hd0,2)
unhide (hd0,1)
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1


title Windows 7 (second)
hide (hd0,1)
unhide (hd0,2)
root (hd0,2)
makeactive
chainloader +1
 
The pressing need is for wife & daughter, who currently need to share the same Laptop, so any advice or instruction would be greatly appreciated. :smile:
 
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Hiding partitions is dark magic. Search these forums (or on Google) for "Vista HnS" or "Vista Hide 'n Seek" to see an app that was never released out of beta that does all this for you.

Clearly both OS partitions need to be 'C' drive when in use (separately of course, with the alternate one being hidden).

That is not very clear at all. Windows runs fine when it is not C: and it is possible to change the OS' view of its own drive letter after cloning a partition without too much trouble. c.f. `HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices`

To answer your core question: you can use it as your boot partition, but no guarantees if it'll still work for recovery. That varies from PC to PC based off manufacturer, make, and model.
 
Hiding partitions is dark magic. Search these forums (or on Google) for "Vista HnS" or "Vista Hide 'n Seek" to see an app that was never released out of beta that does all this for you.

Thanks for that and your reply. Will check it out.

To answer your core question: you can use it as your boot partition, but no guarantees if it'll still work for recovery. That varies from PC to PC based off manufacturer, make, and model.

MSI Wind U100 (Plus .... I think)

I have backed up OS Recovery images and software to other HDDs, plus the odd cloned backup image (various stages of software, drivers, updates).

That is not very clear at all. Windows runs fine when it is not C

I cloned the 'C' drive so every full path for many (perhaps most) programs & data is still set to 'C'.

So I need whatever OS partition that is Active, to be 'C:'.
Will Vista HnS automatically make the Active partition 'C:'?

Very problematical to change everything I need to, even with the Registry key you mentioned or other methods I know of. Being a cloned partition, wouldn't that Registry entry already point to C: ?

Having had a look at that Registry key, I must admit it is beyond my level of understanding. I see the values, but don't know their meaning or what would need adjusting to what.
 
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Further to the above.

My setup is this:
(hd0,0) - (Primary) BIOS_RVY
(hd0,1) - (Primary) Windows 7 (original) (C:\)
(hd0,2) - (Primary) Windows 7 (clone) (was F:\ but currently hidden)
(hd0,3) - (Logical) DATA (D:\)
(hd0,4) - (Logical) DATA (E:\)
I also have a sizable unformatted/unassigned portion at the end of the drive. I may install Linux here at some point.

So whichever Windows 7 partition is Active, I want it to be C: and the other hidden.

The BIOS_RVY partition is 9 Gb, with about 5 Gb used, so would I need to increase the size if I make it System?
 
No you can't. That partition is a normally hidden area for the computer maker's BIOS codes - that is what boots your computer up in the first place. Overwrite it and your machine will make a very odd doorstop.
In other words. will be useless.
 
Mmmm now I have two different answers. Are you sure?

The BIOS_RVY partition is a Recovery one, with a bunch of tools in it. Why would they get overwritten just making it System?
If making any other partition System doesn't overwrite existing content, why would it do so in this instance?
It is a 9 Gb Primary partition with around 4 Gb free.
What is involved with making it System?

I have also read many reports online, of people wiping that partition, deleting it .... even being told they can do so, because aside from Recovery, it is not needed. In fact, if I were to wipe my whole drive, in readiness for installing an OS, wouldn't it be gone?

I can explore that partition and see its content.
 
Threads merged.
That's not quite what MQudsi said, but no, even with a recovery partition you can't view the contents as they are probably encrypted.
 
Mmmmm .... thanks for your responses.

Browsing it with EaseUS Partition Master, I see the following in the root directory.

Folders
System Volume Information
SOURCES
Recovery
EFI
boot

Files
bootmgr
imagex.exe
MGHWCTRL.SYS
MULTIRM.INI
RECOVERYMANAGER.EXE

(Not sure if encrypted, only able to browse it seems.)

The folders are also browsable and have various things in them.

BIOS_RVY.png

In addition to that, I did have a rather long read of the majority of the 29 pages in the Vista HnS topic, which you both participated in. That could indeed be the way forward, but unsure about the 'C:\' drive aspect, as I want whatever Win 7 drive is Active and NOT Hidden, to be C:\.
I seem to recall reading that happens by default with Grub, if no other OS drive is unhidden?

Here is a screenshot of my partitions, including an additional external HDD also plugged in.

Partitions.png
 
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Drive letters are not "real".
They don't exist except in the mind (registry) of a running Windows OS, and they are unique to that OS (i.e. each OS has its own registry map of device/letter correlations).
If you step outside of Windows and look at them with a Linux distro, you won't find any letters. Linux doesn't use such a convention and there is no physical letter attached to the device.
There is a physical label and that's something you can set when you're formatting a disk in Windows. You set both a letter and (optionally but highly desirably) a label. The former is a virtual, internal entity, the latter is physically written in the MBR partition table and is visible to all observers, not just to Windows.
My Windows (7 and 10) are both C (in their own minds) but are also both D (in the mind of the other OS).
They are also both given an unambiguous label.
There is no need to hide one from the other, but if you wish to do so for some reason, you can simply do so with Disk Management.
Instead of telling Windows 7 that Windows 10 drive is to be assigned the letter D (and vice versa), tell it that the other drive has no letter.
Letterless devices, whilst still visible to Disk Management become ghosts to Explorer and hence cannot be accessed (or in consequence, altered)
exp.JPG
The legacy program Vista Hide 'n Seek was something I used for years to hide Vista from XP. That was a program Mqudsi developed using me as his Alpha tester (through 50+ tortuous builds till his software could finally cope with the quirks of my hardware).
It was necessary (and highly effective) then because Longhorn systems used a completely different architecture for system recovery points than the one that ME ->XP had used, but stupidly the same naming convention. This caused XP to see Vista's recovery points as corrupt, and it unhelpfully "fixed" them for you every time you booted it. (fixed them to oblivion).
That problem doesn't occur between the Longhorn family systems (Vista -> W10), or when looking back at XP because backward compatibility was designed in.
There is really no need to try to hide one Windows from another Windows boot manager any more.
 
@Terry60, thanks for your reply.

I kind of understand what you are saying, but one wonders what happens with a cloned drive, where every program config path that is hard set and expects the system drive to be C?

And clearly drive letters are set for drives if the drives are not hidden, and to change the system drive letter has to occur before boot up, from all I have been told.

So while I know how to change the drive letter using Disk Management, and could probably whip up a script easily enough, as I do programming for a hobby, I don't think that can help. I also know how to make one path pretend to be another, but that would be a complex road to go down.

I am well aware of an OS being able to sort itself out, by something like %system%, but that does not help other programs that have absolute paths.

I'm also well aware, that if my drive setup were simpler (less partitions), I could just create a small partition as boot to use with Grub, and from what I have read, it ensures your active (not hidden OS partition), is C.

So it seems I have given myself a hard task, having long ago setup the drive as it is. I recently converted the two Data partitions from Primary to Logical, so I could support having another primary for the clone.

Most of my playing around with partitions and booting, was done many years ago, with Windows XP and earlier, so I am kind of annoyed that MSI decided to waste a Primary partition on their BIOS_RVY, seriously limiting things for users ... if it cannot also be used as the multi-boot partition as well.

Just for the record, as things are. If I don't hide the original OS, it is always C and the clone is always D. That way from what I have read, and even experienced, leads to corruption when booting into the clone ... and running a program that expects to run from C (which exists) not D (the active OS), where it should be running from.

If I hide the original and try to boot into the clone, it never succeeds, because system is hidden with its required boot files. Clearly they need to be on an independent partition, from the two OS ones .... and no doubt a Primary one.
 
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The legacy program Vista Hide 'n Seek was something I used for years to hide Vista from XP. That was a program Mqudsi developed using me as his Alpha tester (through 50+ tortuous builds till his software could finally cope with the quirks of my hardware).

Yes, I read all about your trials and tribulations, and his and many of the others .... damn long read ... but I like to be diligent, as that often saves heartache.
 
Few programs actually have the path hard-coded as C:, it is mostly legacy software (the kind that installs itself to the root of the C:\ drive instead of to "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)") that would have the path hard-coded.

e.g. if you install EasyBCD to the default location of `C:\Program Files\NeoSmart Technologies\EasyBCD\EasyBCD.exe` and change the drive letter to D: and try running EasyBCD from the new path (with `C:\` replaced with `D:\` in the path above), you'll find that it magically "just works" and the same should hold true of any software developed by a programmer worth his or her salt.
 
Thanks for taking the time to continually respond to me.

I don't know that there is more than a couple of programs (php and Python) that have installed themselves to the root of C.
Most desktop & Start Menu shortcuts, plus many INI file entries and registry entries for a whole variety of programs, probably do have absolute paths.
I know with most of my created programs (if not all), I have paths beginning with @SystemDir or @WindowsDir or @ProgramFilesDir and so on. So like you say, they would continue to work.
Lots of good legacy programs out there, and this being Windows 7, it is of course more likely to have such still.
And as you say, it can indeed be a matter of a programmer doing the right thing, but alas many don't, and sometimes you don't have a choice about that ... one of the reasons I started coding myself, was to make up for the shortcomings of many programmers.

In fact, you could say the whole motivation behind wanting a multi-boot scenario, is to get around just such a shortcoming. Both my daughter and wife share the PC, have their own logins and have individual accounts at Amazon for their Kindles. Alas who ever programmed the Kindle For PC app, did not give it the ability to use separate user accounts, dependent on who is logged into Windows. One account only is supported per PC. Talk about limited thinking, as each account is linked to its own credit card anyway.

So my intent here, is to turn their separate Logins into different boot options instead, hence the cloning. They generally reboot anyway, when changing accounts, so no biggie to be that way instead.

Anyway, I'd rather the system drive be C:\ though and avoid any possible issues, and I don't really need or want the non-used OS partition to be unhidden/visible. It can be all too easy to work with stuff in folders on the wrong drive.

So according to what I have read, Grub will hide the non used OS partition, and Windows will automatically assign C as the drive, for the sole visible active OS partition.

The issue is being able to set that up with the current configuration, and why I was hoping to use the BIOS_RVY primary partition, that is available at all times, regardless of what OS partition you boot into.

So is this doable do you think, in some way? Or an alternate solution?
 
I can't believe the Kindle app is so badly coded, that is a huge security issue and horrible design.

But in answer to your question: you are getting yourself into a world of hurt and if I may be blunt, I don't think you're equipped to handle the complications that will arise from the scenario you are asking for.

It would be faster for you to just delete the cloned partition and install a clean installation of Windows 7 to a new partition in that location.
 
From your earlier post #11, the presence of bootmgr etc seems to indicate that the partition in question is already "system". In UEFI, the active and system flags are no longer seen though "boot" still indicates which system is actually running.
You should see in Disk Management (though not necessarily in 3rd party substitutes) that it's called EFI System Partition.
EasyBCD "view settings" (detailed mode) should also tell you the device and path of where you are booting from.
I'm not sure you completely understood when I said earlier that it doesn't matter if you clone multiple C drives and have them all mounted and visible.
They're only C when you boot one of them. Whichever one is booted can only map one C drive (itself), so it will assign other letters to the clones, and you can address any or all of them by the letters which Windows POST (or yourself through Disk Management) assigns to them. You do not have to alter them in any way, and setting (or changing) a letter by which a different system sees them doesn't alter the internal map whereby that system sees itself as C and everything else as something different.
That's a completely different situation to the problem where you want or need a system to see itself as something other than what it currently is.
A system seeeing itself as D will run perfectly happily, even alongside a C disk, but you might get problems with (bad) legacy software (Adobe used to be a prime example) which hardwires C into its program path(s). Other than that those bad programs might put stuff where you weren't expecting, it will be perfectly OK (My XP used to call itself D).
If you wanted to alter D to C in that case, you've got a thousand or more registry entries which will need resassigning. Not a task for the faint-hearted and fraught with danger.
The key is in my original sentence - the letters don't actually exist except in the mind of the running OS.
 
I can't believe the Kindle app is so badly coded, that is a huge security issue and horrible design.

But in answer to your question: you are getting yourself into a world of hurt and if I may be blunt, I don't think you're equipped to handle the complications that will arise from the scenario you are asking for.

It would be faster for you to just delete the cloned partition and install a clean installation of Windows 7 to a new partition in that location.

Thanks for your input .... and the leap of faith ... LOL. Ha ha ha .... but hey, that's why I am consulting with experts. :smile:
Maybe I will indeed have to do as you say.
 
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I'm not sure you completely understood when I said earlier that it doesn't matter if you clone multiple C drives and have them all mounted and visible.
You are right, I did not pickup on that, but that may have been due to the bias of my experience, the one time I tried ... where the original stayed C, and the Active was D.

You should see in Disk Management (though not necessarily in 3rd party substitutes) that it's called EFI System Partition.
I'm not seeing that in Disk Management. When I right-click that partition, all I get is a Help option, which opens the Disk Management help file. The only clue to what it is, is it being labelled as "Healthy (Recovery Partition)". It is unlike the other partitions, that have a 'Properties' option.

From your earlier post #11, the presence of bootmgr etc seems to indicate that the partition in question is already "system".
It does indeed seem to indicate that, yet the one time I hid the original OS partition and attempted to boot into the cloned one, booting never completed. So I can only presume there was something necessary on the original Win 7 OS partition, that was no longer accessible due to being hidden. To recover from that, I had to use my old Paragon boot disc, to go in and unhide the original. No doubt this was due to EasyBCD being on the original OS partition ... and perhaps being the missing necessity I mentioned. Which is why I wondered if EasyBCD could be copied to the Recovery partition, without hurting anything.
 
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