Recently somebody brought me a 2-year old HP Pavillion that had one of those system recovery partitions that HP stores the XP image on in case the OS gets corrupt. In this case the Maxtor 80G drive had numerous read errors on the C: drive, but fewer on the D (system recovery) partition. The drive was a mess. I tried to run Spinrite on it, but it said it would take 17,000 hours to fix (not kidding). When I slaved the drive, WinXP could see the drive, but it couldn't open it to see the files. It just paused for a minute or so and then asked if I wanted to format it because according to Windows it didn't appear that it was formatted. I tried the recovery console using chkdsk and fixboot and stuff, but chkdsk stopped with an error after a few minutes and fixboot didn't seem to do anything. In this particular case I was in luck because the lady had the image on CD’s (eight of them) and I was able to install it back to a new HDD easy enough. She had them because she had a problem with the PC before when it was under warranty and HP mailed them to her. But what if I was not that lucky and the PC wasn’t under warranty and I didn't want to call HP and pay for the CD's. She already paid for an XP license, and she shouldn't have to pay again even though I guy at a CompUSA said it was not that costly. What if she called HP’s tech support line, and upon finding out her PC was out of warranty, they switched her over to the sales department? I’m not sure how that would go down, but even so she'd probably be out of a computer for a week waiting for the CD’s to show up in the mail. I’m thinking that there must be a way with the help of some software tools out there to copy just the D: partition over to a new drive and then do the system restore by pressing <F10>, or whatever key it was. In her case I tried to use Ghost to take a full drive image and it stopped after a minute saying there were read errors. There were a few read errors on the D drive so making an image of that didn't work either but what if the D drive was intact?
Ok, list of questions coming up…
Does Ghost have a switch that will ignore errors?
Would Ghost put the recovery partition back on the drive in the same spot it came from so that it wouldn’t mess up the system recovery process?
Does the system recovery partition use other pieces in the boot sector that make it go, and if the boot sector is damaged are you out of luck even if you could salvage the files from the system recovery partition?
Does the system recovery process use the BIOS in any way? What does pressing F10, or whatever key it is, really do?
Windows won’t let you see the files in the D drive, you get an error saying it is used for system recovery, is there a way around that within Windows?
Is that system recovery partition really the primary partion? Dos based programs always list it first for some reason.
Has anybody had any luck using dos boot disk and copy the recovery files over to a USB external or something and just use Fdisk to make your own partions on a new HDD and copying the files back over to the new drive and trying to restore the image then?
Has anybody tried to do this and found some tools to make it easy?
Is it easier just to call HP and order the disks?
Ok, list of questions coming up…
Does Ghost have a switch that will ignore errors?
Would Ghost put the recovery partition back on the drive in the same spot it came from so that it wouldn’t mess up the system recovery process?
Does the system recovery partition use other pieces in the boot sector that make it go, and if the boot sector is damaged are you out of luck even if you could salvage the files from the system recovery partition?
Does the system recovery process use the BIOS in any way? What does pressing F10, or whatever key it is, really do?
Windows won’t let you see the files in the D drive, you get an error saying it is used for system recovery, is there a way around that within Windows?
Is that system recovery partition really the primary partion? Dos based programs always list it first for some reason.
Has anybody had any luck using dos boot disk and copy the recovery files over to a USB external or something and just use Fdisk to make your own partions on a new HDD and copying the files back over to the new drive and trying to restore the image then?
Has anybody tried to do this and found some tools to make it easy?
Is it easier just to call HP and order the disks?