Background/Cause

Several months ago, I upgraded my laptop's hard-drive to an SSD. The SSD is smaller than the hard-drive, so I freed up enough space for it to fit and cloned the drive to the SSD, with the only changes being that I shrank the laptop-recovery partition that contains the drive images from 15GB to 11GB and the system boot volume from 100MB to 50MB.

The system booted up just fine and I've been using Windows for the past few months without problem (at least no problems that can be attributed to the cloning/upgrade).

Problem(s)

There is however one (technically three) problems that are likely due to the change:

1. The memory test won't run and gives a 0xc000000e error about memtest.exe.
2. Windows Repair won't run and gives a 0xc000000f error.
3. The (Acer) laptop's system recovery function won't run from pressing Alt+F11 (I double- and tripled-checked the BIOS setting that could prevent it from working).

Mitigation Attempts

I created a Windows Recovery DVD from within Windows and used that to access the Windows Repair environment and it complained about a problem and fixed it. I rebooted into the Recovery environment and ran bootrec with the /scanos, /fixboot, /fixmbr, and /rebuildbcd.

Results

Now the memory test works! 👍 One down, two to go.

Problems - Redux, Reprise, Part II, The Return

Unfortunately, pressing F8 to access the boot menu and selecting Repair still gives a 0xc000000f error and Alt+F11 still won't bring up the system-recovery D2D program.

I suspect the former problem has something to do with the C:\Recovery folder, but it looks intact, so I don't know why Windows is unable to load WinRE.wim from it. I don't think it's a matter of permissions. 🤔 I can only think that maybe the BCD isn't correct, but I can't find any information on fixing it (all the pages that come up when doing a web-search say to boot into the recovery environment, but that's what won't load, and the stuff they say to do, I already did from the one that I booted from DVD).

As for the Acer system-recovery, I assume that's got to do with the recovery partition being smaller than it used to be and/or the offset having changed. The partition is there and the files are accessible (I can assign a drive-letter in Windows and access them), but the BIOS program might not be seeing it. Could it be hard-coded to look for the partition at a specific sector 🤔 (and thus be a colossal bit of bad coding ¬_¬)?

Resources

This isn't my system; it's the only "screenshot" I could find related to the Acer D2D system-recovery function. In my BIOS, there are two settings that could block it, one is simply setting it as enabled or not, and the other is setting is the SATA mode, both of which are correct, so the hotkey should be launching the D2D program on reboot (it used to work when it was the hard-drive).

Here's my BCDEdit status. It's pretty normal (looks almost identical to other ones I can find). (Note, the GUIDs are irrelevant and the driver-signing flags are not related.) The only difference is that Windows is loading from volume 2 instead of 1, but that's correct; volume 0 is the laptop recovery partition, volume 1 is the system boot volume, and volume 2 is C:. What's strange is that there's no mention of the recovery environment in there, but I don't see it in screenshots of other people's systems either. I could have sworn BCDs used to contain a reference to it. 🤔