Trying to Clone an HP Drive

[Perryg114]

I bought a refurbished PC and the hard drive started reporting a smart drive error immediately. I am trying to clone the drive but it has three partitions on it. It has recovery, system, and windows. I tried just imaging over the windows directory but it won't boot. It must be using the system directory to launch the widows partition. I really don't know how to set this up. I am using acronis 2012 which is a bit of a pain to deal with. So would I make this small system partition the boot drive or what? Why do they do it this way. I just install windows in one partition. Why all this BS?

Thanks

Perry

 

[Perryg114]

I would like to get rid of the MSR partition all together. It makes restoring a drive a real pain. I can do and exact clone but then a 1T disk becomes a 250G disk. It seems that neither acronis or windows can make the MSR partion unless you are installing from scratch. Can I just copy the files from the system partion to the C: root of the windows partition?

Perry

 

[Cerb]

No, you cannot just copy files and have it work.

You need the image the drive, as it is. Then, you can make the main partition bigger.

 

[Perryg114]

I got it to work but I am worried how I am going to make this work if the disk crashes and I don't have the original one to clone. I assume I can load an image of the windows partition onto an existing partition if I want to load an image that has all the software etc that has been installed. So my question now is, how do I create this partition structure and make it work in the future without the original disk. How do I use the recovery partition to reinstall windows?

Perry

 

[Perryg114]

Ok I was able to do this the hard way as well. I partitioned the disk with disk director (Acronis) I made a 350MB active partition and the rest of the drive was a logical drive with the Windows stuff on it. I restored the system partition to the 350MB partition and the Windows partition to the logical drive. It booted fine. This way I can just backup the Window partition and not worry about the other stuff.

Perry

 

[Elixer]

The 350MB system reserved partition is for boot code, and also bitlocker stuff.
You still need to backup that, since you can't just clone over the window's partition to a new disk and expect it to boot. Yes, there are ways around it.

Anyway, the recovery partition is usually activated by some key press you do at boot time, and it depends on the machine in question.
That will re-image the HD to factory defaults.

 

[Cerb]

Anyway, the recovery partition is usually activated by some key press you do at boot time, and it depends on the machine in question.
That will re-image the HD to factory defaults.

Sadly, on most new PCs, it's activated either from within Windows, or through the repair menu; and thus needs a moderately healthy OS to be used, with Windows 8, and at least some semblance of a booting OS to function with Windows 7.