Can I transfer a recovery partition to a new hard drive

juliasdream

My hard drive has failed and unrepairable but the recovery partition is still good
I have just bought a new hard drive and I'd like to transfer the recovery partition across
I have the use of another computer and a hard drive caddy
Can anyone help me with advice on doing this so that it will work when installed in the laptop
It's a Toshiba Satellite C660-116 with license for Win 7 Home premium OA

50Twuncle

juliasdream wrote: »

My hard drive has failed and unrepairable but the recovery partition is still good
I have just bought a new hard drive and I'd like to transfer the recovery partition across
I have the use of another computer and a hard drive caddy
Can anyone help me with advice on doing this so that it will work when installed in the laptop
It's a Toshiba Satellite C660-116 with license for Win 7 Home premium OA

As long as you select "show hidden files" in the options
I see no reason why it shouldn't work
How you boot from this partition - should the need arise - is another problem (the BIOS may be set up for a specific size HDD and partition size)

espresso

juliasdream wrote: »

My hard drive has failed and unrepairable but the recovery partition is still good
I have just bought a new hard drive and I'd like to transfer the recovery partition across
I have the use of another computer and a hard drive caddy
Can anyone help me with advice on doing this so that it will work when installed in the laptop
It's a Toshiba Satellite C660-116 with license for Win 7 Home premium OA

Check the file system format of your recovery partition because they are usually a FAT 32 partition and not NTFS like the normal user partitions.

bluesnake

juliasdream wrote: »

My hard drive has failed and unrepairable but the recovery partition is still good...

while this is possible to have a good recover partition, I have not seen a disk do this in years as it tends to be all or nothing these days? Are you sure just has totally failed beyond reformat?

juliasdream

50Twuncle wrote: »

As long as you select "show hidden files" in the options
I see no reason why it shouldn't work
How you boot from this partition - should the need arise - is another problem (the BIOS may be set up for a specific size HDD and partition size)

The new hard drive is 250Gb and so is the original one

bluesnake wrote: »

while this is possible to have a good recover partition, I have not seen a disk do this in years as it tends to be all or nothing these days? Are you sure just has totally failed beyond reformat?

Yes It wouldnt boot into windows before and after I ran recovery.
I put it in a caddy on another computer and only the partition showed as a useable drive the main drive came up as needing formatting so I formatted it
Ran recovery again and the same thing happened. It half booted into windows then hung
put it back in the caddy and again it showed as needing to be formatted

bluesnake

juliasdream wrote: »

The new hard drive is 250Gb and so is the original one

Yes It wouldnt boot into windows before and after I ran recovery.
I put it in a caddy on another computer and only the partition showed as a useable drive the main drive came up as needing formatting so I formatted it
Ran recovery again and the same thing happened. It half booted into windows then hung
put it back in the caddy and again it showed as needing to be formatted

Disk are quite cheap, but if you wanted to play (after you have backed up your recovery partition), and providing the disk boot sector is not duff, you might be able to partition out the bad track section and only use the remaining good section ones?

Once you have backed up, the disk manufacturers often have free diagnostic tools on their site