The partition contains recovery software used to perform maintenance tasks on the PC. Inspiron, Studio and XPS models include Dell DataSafe Local; OptiPlex, Latitude, Vostro and Precision models.
Hi,
I accidentally deleted my windows 10 boot partition during some maintenance activities on my computer. So, now I do not see the Windows option on my PC in the UEFI boot loader. I do have CentOS 7 installed on an external USB hard drive so I booted into that and downloaded the Windows 10 ISO. I have created a bootable thumb drive using the ISO on CentOS using gparted.
So I booted using the thumb drive and chose the Windows 10 repair option but it did not help. I have 2 SSDs on my machine and I do not want to lose any of the data including the windows settings if I choose a fresh install option. My disk layout on Windows was:
C: - Windows was installed here. This is a 1 TB SSD Drive.
D: - Second 1 TB SSD Drive.
When I'm on Linux, then I can see those drives as 2 separate devices and I can also access the files on them. The device that corresponds to the C: drive still seems to have all the Windows installation data. If I boot into the Windows 10 thumb drive and select the fresh installation option then it lists all my partitions but I'm not sure which is which and I do not want to delete data by mistake. So, is there a way for me to fix the Windows efi records?
Would appreciate any help!
Thanks,
Sachin
With limited USB ports (just 2) and no CD-ROM/DVD-ROM bay, is there a way I can boot off an ISO image stored on a Windows partition? I would like to use the ISO as a live CD and without the use of virtualization.
PeanutsMonkeyPeanutsMonkey
1 Answer
You may be able to boot from the 'content' of the ISO image, but usually not the ISO itself.
I am not sure about the low level operations, but it is possible for a bootloader to emulate an optical drive with the ISO image based on some BIOS interrupts, but at some point of booting, the kernel entering protected mode or a kernel mode optical drive driver kicking in will render it useless and the booting will stop as the driver fails to find the 'virtual optical drive' and mount the root filesystem. There may be ways to make it work, but probably not worth the effort if there is alternatives... shown below.
What you can do instead:
There are numerous tools that allow creating a live USB using the ISO image of Linux/*BSD/... live CD, one of them is UNetbootin. (I mentioned this just because I only remember this at the moment.) You can then boot the 'live CD' with the USB flash drive.
It is also possible to manually extract the files from the ISO, install a custom bootloader (e.g. grub2, syslinux) and boot the 'live CD' directly, but this is far more advanced and can easily mess up your computer if done incorrectly, so I suggest you simply make a live USB.
There is also a possible way to boot from an ISO image, but this is not guaranteed to work for every live CDs... You can use EasyBCD to add a boot entry which will boot from an ISO image. It provides a free version for personal non-commercial use.
Alvin WongAlvin Wong