I’ve been working with and learning about recovery partitions on Windows boot/system disks lately. My explorations led me to a decent but flawed tool that does some nice things for Windows OS recovery. It’s called AOMEI OneKey Recovery, and it’s available in both free and commercial versions. In theory, installing this program is easy. You must make space on your system/boot drive. Then, AOMEI OneKey Recovery adds partitions to that disk for boot-up and repair. As a bonus, its recovery partition incorporates a backup of your Windows OS partition. But in practice, AOMEI OneKey Recovery gets interesting. It’s particularly so when it comes to sizing the disk space that the program needs for its partitions. Here’s what the nominal 256 GB SSD drive on my Dell Venue Pro 11 7130 looked like when the program finished its work:
Alas, considerable trial and error was required to properly size the F: partition I had to give AOMEI OneKey Recovery to work with.
Lack of Sizing Data Means AOMEI OneKey Recovery Gets Interesting Indeed!
To begin with, the program provides no guidance on how to size the partition from which it will create its partitions. These are labeled AOMEI and AOMEI Recovery Partition in the preceding screen capture from the Disk Management utility. I started small (at around 2 GB), and went through too many muffed attempts last night. I got increasingly vexed as I kept upping the size of the F: partition that OneKey Recovery used for the AOMEI partitions shown. For each try, I had to use MiniTool Partition Wizard to reduce the size of the C: partition. Then I used that space to expand the F: partition. Things didn’t work until the F: partition hit 44 GB in size. Finally, it created the disk layout depicted in the preceding graphic.
The problem was, resizing the C: partition requires a reboot to do its thing. For each attempt, I used MiniTool Partition Wizard to shrink the C: partition. Then I could grow the F: partition by the same amount. Each iteration took 3-4 minutes to complete because of the time involved in shifting partition boundaries and waiting for the reboot to complete. By the time I’d done this five times I was ready to spit nails. Surely AOMEI could expend the programming effort necessary to analyze the files on the C: partition and estimate the partition size needed to accommodate them? I would have been much happier with my experience in using the software if I didn’t have to keep repeating my attempts to set up those pesky partitions.
It’s Not All Tar and Feathers, However…
To give credit where it’s due, AOMEI OneKey Recovery was reasonably well-behaved aside from the lack or partition sizing information or guidance. It added itself nicely to my Boot Configuration Database (BCD data) on the Dell Venue Pro 11. Better yet, it didn’t mess with the Macrium Recovery Partition already installed on that drive. In testing of its onekey functionality, it worked quite nicely. The program offered to restore my backed-up runtime environment to the C: partition without a hitch. It took about 10 minutes to create the two partitions shown. Thus, I’m guessing it would take about the same amount of time to restore the contents of its Recovery Partition to C:, should that become necessary. I’ll try it out this weekend, when I have some spare time to devote to that task. I’ll follow up with an update then.
On balance I think this is a good tool for a free program. But because it does require resizing of the C: partition to create the space needed for its partitions, a commercial partition manager is needed to put it to work. Not coincidentally AOMEI makes one of those, too. But I prefer MiniTool Partition Wizard, mostly because I already know and understand how to use that program.
Nice. I use AOMEI Backupper and it has saved the day for me many times. Generally works very well and AOMEI Boot Disks are useful if the system will not start at all.
As for sizing the Recovery Partition, possibly using an existing AOMEI Image file size as a guide would work. Currently my W10 system is 35GB and the AOMEI Image is 30GB, so setting the Recovery Partition at say 35GB may be a good start.
Thing is, the free space on the system SSD partition is 76GB so near half of the free space would be taken up with the Recovery Partition. Not a deal breaker though.
But, i am of the understanding that as the SSD blocks ‘wear’, it re-assigns data to other blocks (wear leveling). I may have a totally wrong concept of this but my thinking is by having 76GB free, there is plenty (?) of capacity to accommodate wear leveling, deferring a new SSD as long as possible and ultimately not having to move my OS to a new drive and likely having to go thru the MS re-activation process. Maybe the wear rate on my SSD is so low/slow it will never be an issue. I do however install & uninstall lots of programs to try out as i am a bit of a junky in this respect. The SSD is purely dedicated to the OS with all other data stored on separate HDD’s.
Interested in any comments re this.
cheers