Tested Solutions to No System Recovery Options in Windows 10/8/7

When your system is in serious issue, you can enter Advanced Startup Options and use one or more of the recovery options to recover your system. However, under some circumstances, you may find out that no system recovery options are available. Read on to know more and find a solution.

What is in Windows Recovery Options?

In the event of system error, you can use the tools included in Windows System Recovery Options menu to restore or reinstall your Windows system back to normal. In Windows 7, you have Startup Repair, System Restore, System Image Recovery, Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool, Command Prompt. Windows 10 has added more options to help you recover Windows, such as, Reset your PC, and Go back to the previous build.

How did Windows recovery options disappear?

If the Windows recovery options are not listed in the Advanced Startup options, then your computer doesn't include preinstalled recovery options, your network administrator may have turned them off, or the windows recovery image corrupted.

Solutions to no recovery option in Windows 7/8/10

Enable Recovery Options

To see if the recovery options have been disabled, you can run command “reagent /info” in an alleviated command prompt to check it.

1. To open an elevated command prompt, you can type “CMD” in the Windows search box and press Enter. In the listed results, right click on the Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

2. In the Administrator Command Prompt window, type “reagent /info” (without quotes) and press Enter.

3. If it is disabled, you certainly cannot even boot into recovery environment. To re-enable it, just type “reagentc /enable”.

If the Windows Re status is Enable and you still have no system recovery options, then you should check if the Windows RE location is valid. If this image file corrupted or missing, you cannot use the Windows Recovery Options.

Specify the Recovery image or fix it

If your computer has a Windows recovery partition, the Windows RE file should in that recovery partition. You can use Disk Management to sign a drive letter to the recovery partition, and then you can view the file in Windows File Explorer.

If no recovery partition on your hard drive, the WinRe.wim file should be in C: drive. By default, the Recovery folder is hidden. You need to uncheck the option Hide system protected files before you can see the Recovery folder.

After you locate the Recovery folder, you can copy the WinRE.wim file from another Windows working computer to this location and specify this location path. If you are using Windows 10 Professional, you can copy the WinRE file from Windows 10 Home, but you cannot use WinRE file from Windows 7.

If you cannot get a working WinRE.wim file, you can copy WinRE.wim from the Windows installation ISO, which you can download from Microsoft.

After you replace the WinRE.wim file, then you type the following command in an elevated command prompt:

 “Reagentc /setreimage /path C:\Recovery\WindowsRE” (without quotes)

After that, you should be able to see the disappeared system recovery options in Windows 10/8/7.

Use a Windows recovery drive or system repair disc instead

If the Windows 10 recovery option missing, you can boot your computer from a Windows bootable media to use the recovery options, besides trying those methods to fix the problem on your computer.

If you are using Windows 7, you can create a system repair disc from another working computer that running the same version of Windows system. It means you cannot create a repair disc from Windows 7 32bit and then use it on Windows 7 64 bit.

If you are using Windows 10/8, you can create a Windows recovery USB disk from another computer. Then boot from the system repair disc tor recovery drive to use the recovery tools.

Create a custom recovery partition with system image

Besides Windows recovery options, you can also create another recovery option to restore your computer when needed. You can use AOMEI OneKey Recovery to create a recovery partition in Windows 10/8/7 which has a system image that includes all the programs installed on system drive.

You can also use "Scheduler” to set up automatic system backup daily/weekly/monthly.

When your system cannot boot, you can press a specified key “F1” or “A” at startup to boot into AOMEI OneKey Recovery environment. From there, you can easily restore your system back to normal with only a few clicks.

If you cannot fix the problem no system recovery options and you do not want to always prepare a recovery media, then you should consider using this freeware AOMEI OneKey Recovery to create a custom recovery partition with a system image on your hard drive, so you can restore your system back when your system is in serious error.