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Transferring a recovery partition to a new drive?

silverfox2

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Posted November 12, 2012 at 7:15PM

My HP laptop has suffered a partial hard drive failure - I can still boot up into windows but after working for a while it just freezes up.I ran the diagnostic start up tool and it got to 50% before giving me an error message and the news that the drive had failed and should be replaced. I have tried to create recovery discs(I know, I know, I should have done this sooner) to use when I replace the drive ,but this process got to 86% before the computer froze again. I tried this three times but it froze at the same place each time. My question is this : if I copy the contents of the recovery partition to an external drive then copy them back to a new partition on the new drive when installed, can anyone say why that wouldn't work? That seems a much easier solution than burning recovery disks - or is it not a solution at all? I should say that I have used the recovery partition before to reinstall the OS and know that this works so I'm hoping that this part of the drive is still OK. I would welcome any observations or suggestions. Thanks.

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Nontek

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Posted November 12, 2012 at 7:35PM

Hmm, as it is too late to make Recovery disc,you could try your own suggestion - it might work, it might not, but I don't see you have any other choice under the circumstances

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rdave13

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Posted November 12, 2012 at 7:43PM

Never done it but see this link. You could try that and see what happens when you tap the appropriate key at booting with the new hard drive.

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted November 12, 2012 at 7:48PM

if I copy the contents of the recovery partition to an external drive then copy them back to a new partition on the new drive when installed, can anyone say why that wouldn't work?

If you are lucky it will

but usually this part of the drive need to be bootable and accessed by the BIOS from certain key presses at POST.

Therefore you may need to actually clone the recovery partition to another drive.

If the recovery partition only holds a set of image files (like a MEDION) then you need a bootable recovery CD to run the image files.

Make and model of machine?

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lotvic

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Posted November 13, 2012 at 12:09AM

and what O/S is it. XP, Vista, W7?

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lotvic

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Posted November 13, 2012 at 12:15AM

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silverfox2

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Posted November 13, 2012 at 4:47PM

Thanks for all the tips. The laptop is an HP G7000 running Vista Home Basic. Only just thought of looking at the files on the recovery partition and in fact there's only one,with a drive icon at the beginning, called appropriately "Recovery".Clicking on the file properties shows it to be 4.46MB in size and containing 27 files.Strangely clicking on the drive properties reports used space of 8.94GB with 2.14GB free. As soon as my new drive arrives I'll work through the suggestions and report back. Thanks for your time.

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woodchip

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Posted November 13, 2012 at 5:08PM

The Best way it to Image the full Drive, using a Imaging Program Like Acronis True Image or another free one, As with Acronis it only makes a Image of Partition Info and Contents, Not Empty Space. This may avert the bad Clusters on the Drive. If you Clone it will Have problems trying to clone because of the Cluster Problem

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