copying recovery partition to new hard drive???

[doug_ny]

I have a compaq presario with a failing drive. 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 grab all the important stuff (like their proprietary MBR to get at the recovery partition). I used EASUS, and resized the OS partition so as to squeeze the whole thing onto a 120gb drive. I couldn't keep the win7 boot partition the same size with EASUS, so I gave it a few extra MB just to be safe.

But -- this did not work. Windows booted fine, but when trying to boot to the recovery partition (F11 at boot), it failed and gave error "device not available". It *was* loading the partition, but the program there didn't find what it expected - it seems.

What am I supposed to do to move this thing? I'd order the discs but Compaq's instructions and requirements look like a confusing pain in the ass.

 

[corkyg]

Why not put the recovery partition on a bootable CDR or Thumb drive?

 

[bruceb]

You need to use a program like Acronis TruImage and do a Clone of the entire hard drive over to the new one. I think Acronis will let you go to a smaller size drive or you can use a drive with the same or more amount of space.

 

[corkyg]

That's correct - TrueImage can clone proportionally up or down. That has existed for several years and versions.

 

[Level_1]

Use gparted and change the boot flag on the recovery partition to enable. Then restart normally and see it it boot to the recovery partition. If it work try the recovery(on you test HDD). Change back the boot flag to the windows partition after the recovery is done.