Recovery Partition on HDD Used to Instal OS on SSD, possible?

[TheSiege]

Can I take the recovery partition on my old laptop HDD and use it for a fresh install on my SSD and then not have a recovery partition on my SSD at all? Its a lenovo if that makes a difference

 

[Coup27]

Yes but you really don't want to. What you want to do is go over to the Lenovo website, download all of the drivers for your laptop, stick them on a usb stick, swap the HDD for the SSD and then clean install with an OEM version of Windows and use your licence key on the bottom of the machine.

The whole process will probably take around the same amount of time as the faff involved on cloning the recovery partition onto the SSD and then removing it afterwards and the result will be 10x better. Factory pre-loads are awful.

 

[TheSiege]

Yeah, lenovo actually does a really good job, little to no bloatware, but I will do the method you suggested

 

[Coup27]

Plus I seem to remember from somewhere that you can only redistribute free space backwards (for want of a better term). Example:

Your factory HDD will be [recovery partition] then [data_partitions(s)].

If you deleted the recovery partition and made it free space, you would not be able to allocate that free space to the data_partitions because they are "after" it.

I don't know all the correct terminology but hopefully you get what I've badly explained?

 

[TheSiege]

yeah, I was looking more to use the factory partition to create the SSD OS, not actually put the partition on the SSD itself

 

[VirtualLarry]

Make a set of recovery CD/DVDs using the recovery partition and pre-installed OS.

Then install the SSD, and use the discs to re-install the factory-provided OS.

 

[Sunburn74]

It depends. I can't speak for Lenovo, but I can speak for HP. The HP envy 14 which I own has recovery disks which cannot be used with SSDs (more specifically any drive that is smaller than the original HP drive) and the only way allegedly to update the system would be to either clone the drive after reducing the footprint or do a clean OEM install and transfer the key.

Anyway if you ever run into trouble or lack the correct windows OEM install disk this website was very helpful and still legal. It's steps should presumably work on any laptop.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-compaq/432564-hp-laptop-out-box-guide-2-0-windows-7-a.html

 

[razel]

The notebookreview forum has been a fantastic wealth of laptop knowledge and full of no-non sense real world SSD users for me. Check their Lenovo thread. My experience with with recovery partitions is.. it depends.

Gateway and HP recover partitions clone well. Dell ones don't. What you're hoping on doing is unlikely mostly because most recovery partitions don't let you choose a drive to recover to. As others have suggested, your best best is to clone the drive... recover on the new drive... then delete the recovery partition. But that's more trouble than it's worth.