copying recovery partition to new hard drive???

[venm11]

I have a compaq presario whose drive is failing (bad blocks in OS partition). I don't have recovery discs for it, and the recovery partition is intact, so I want to copy everything to another hard drive. But that hasn't worked out so far.

The original drive is 500gb. As an experiment, I tried to copy the entire disk to a 120gb with EASUS to grab any other important sectors (MBR), and the OS partition to a resized one on the 120gb drive. The windows boot partition may have also been resized, I had a hard time maintaining it's size.

But -- this did not work. When trying to boot to the recovery partition (F11), it appeared to work at first, but then gave error "device not available" - pretty unhelpful. In fact, I've had a number of problems with this compaq getting tools to run because most of them choke on this proprietary crap.

What am I supposed to do to move this thing? I'd order the disks, compaq's instructions and requirements for this are really confusing and I can't wait that long.

 

[Netwerkz101]

What model number presario?
What OS / version ?

If it's not too old, it's easy to call HP to order recovery media - I have done it before for a customer.

If you have MSDN or Technet, and you have valid product key/COA sticker on the notebook, you may be able to get the same OS and just activate it using the product key on the laptop.

Imaging software should allow you the option to copy partitions only.
Also, you should be able to do a raw, byte-for-byte, copy but some programs this is not default.

In your situation, I would not bother trying to clone the entire drive ... just all the partitions you
know are good (are you 100% sure only the OS partition is corrupted?).

I'd lay down those cloned partitions on a new drive and recreate the OS partition manually and
attempt to recover to it.

 

[bigdogchris]

I've got this to work but I believe it was Dell. Dell has in the past placed it's recovery partition at the beginning of drives, where HP/Compaq put them at the end. Of course this makes cloning the default images to larger drives and maintaining the recovery partition much easier on Dell.