Windows 10 Recovery Partition - Beginning of Drive?

[p4cm4n]

For years I’ve been doing my reference image in ESXi, on a 30GB VHD, installed, audit mode, ran scripts, sysprep, captured with fog.
I’ve always used “Multiple Partition Image - Not Resizable” because I had issues with FOG trying to resize in the past - I handled this by using the <extendospartition>true flag in my unattend.xml.

I never noticed, but apparently my recovery partition always began the disk.

1. recovery
2. efi
3. msr
4. OS
   But now, with 2004 and trying to create a reference image, it creates the recovery at the end of the drive, which causes nothing to happen with the extendOSpartition flag. I always end up with a 29.3 GB partition on any machine I deploy to.

Any chance anyone knows how to force windows 10 to install the recovery partition at the beginning of the drive again? I’m not even sure how I did it in the first place - I’m realizing and testing that I can use single disk resizable in FOG, but would like to ‘fix’ it how it was used before if possible.

[george1421]

First of all its not the best place to put the recovery partition at the beginning of the disk. The MS recommends the efi partition be on disk 1 partition 1. It has been that way for years. Also I would question the logic of needing a recovery partition at all. With FOG its much faster to rebuilt the system then to try to recover it. I understand (as someone recently pointed out) that if the computer is at a remote location to the FOG server then the only option is to try to recover it. On my campus I don’t use/create the recovery partition at all. I do use MDT to build the golden image, with MDT I can chose how to create the disk layout for both bios and uefi systems. If I had a choice I would place the recovery partition before the drive partition, that would make the biggest resizable partition last on the disk where it can be easily resized.