Recovery partition

[RegEdit]

What do you'all do when a hard drive is too damaged to use, but perhaps the recovery partition is healthy? Do you use a program like GetDataBack or R-Studio to image the recovery partition to another (healthy) drive?

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

Personally I'd avoid the recovery partiton altogether and install a clean copy of Windows without all the value-added-crap

Is there some particular reason that you need to use the recovery partition?

 

[RegEdit]

I agree, but this just happens to be the one Windows disk that I don't have and the customer is in a hurry.

 

[MobileTechie]

I've successfully cloned recovery partitions. I've found you can just mark then as the boot volume and boot into them.

The disk usually has a custom MBR allowing access to the recovery via a key combination at boot. If you don't clone this along with it, they lose that function. I try to keep that if I can because I like to give them back a fully functioning laptop but it's not always possible.