Using Recovery Button to Boot OS

snoop

Member
I have a lenovo laptop with a "OneKey Restore" button. This button boots directly to the recovery partition without any user interaction. It would be nice to have this button boot another operating system so my power button would boot Win7 and the recovery button boot osx. So my current setup is Win7 and OSX and no recovery partition. Would it be possible to fool my computer in thinking the OSX is the recovery partition?
 
Maybe, but its not a good idea to mess up the ability to boot from the recovery partition.
What you need is EasyBCD. This well allow you to create an entry for OS X and give you a menu to choose which OS you would like to start.
 
I am not really a fan of the recovery partition as I have the windows 7 disks. I am currently setup with a dual boot OSX enviroment using windows bootloader. EasyBCD really helped.

I was thinking that many computers do have this recovery option. I think HP/Compaqs can press F11 on boot to hit the recovery partition. So this has to be a universal thing in which manufacturers are using.

I see the option in Easy BCD that allows for WinPE enviroments. I was wondering if this had anything to do with it. I am just checking if I am even in the right forum. This idea sounds like its in the BCD and not the MBR.
 
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That document was a fantastic read. It was very comprehensive. i have spent many hours googling with no luck looking for exactly that.

The Microsoft way to do this is to sense a key press during the bios screen. I think the lenovo recovery button is just that. I am going to restore my harddrive to factory specs this week. If this document is correct and Lenovo is doing this, then there should be an object labeled "customactions" in the bcd.
 
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