Clone laptop hidden recovery partition

[Ignatius]

I'm in the middle of recovering a friend's Packard Bell laptop. The HD is dying and I've managed to resurrect it using MHDD (HDDGURU: MHDD) then I backed up his data to an external HD. I have the laptop recovery DVD and I've tried to reinstall the OS (XP MCE) to factory default on a new HD but it complained that the HD doesn't contain any information.

 

After a bit of digging, it seems that I need to have the hidden recovery partition on the new HD. I'm familiar with Ghost on a bootable floppy so I figured it would be easy to transfer the hidden partition ... but Ghost doesn't see it. I attached the HD to a Windows XP laptop and Disk Management recognises the hidden Backup partition as 5.86GB FAT32!

 

I'm not familiar with any other disk imaging software. Does anyone have any recommendations to help me copy the hidden partition (preferably free)? I had considered imaging the whole 160GB HD to the new one but my desktop (on which I used Ghost) is very old and it whinged about the BIOS not supporting such a large partition. I guess that if I had been able to clone the whole thing, I could have deleted the Data partition and then used the recovery DVD to reinstall to factory default.

 

Gee - laptop manufacturers don't make it easy, do they?

 

Thanks in advance.

[James2k]

 

Dos_Box

Edited April 6, 2010 by Dos_Box

[pete]

Gee - laptop manufacturers don't make it easy, do they?

 

Blame your friend - he bought the packard bell (Am I the only one who remembers their combo vga/sound/modem cards?)

 

You could try Clonezilla or using ImageX on a WinPE cd / bootable usb drive.

 

If all else fails, boot a Knoppix / ubuntu live cd and use dd to make a copy of the partition.

[Ignatius]

Thank you pete, I hadn't thought of using dd. If that doesn't get me anywhere, I'll look into Clonezilla.

[MicrodigitUK]

I would use a tool like Partition Magic to un-hide the partition then use Ghost to take an image of the disk. Put that onto the new disk and then hide the partition again.

 

I know RM use a similar tool that puts backups onto a fat32 partition called RMRBOOT and I just unhide the partition with Partition Magic before ghosting.

 

Although it can be done in the menu with the RMRBOOT tool. Possibly the Packard Bell tool has a similar option.

[SimpleSi]

CLonezilla has always managed to copy all partitions for me using it in whole drive copy mode

 

regards

 

Simon