Is it possible to burn a Recovery Partition onto a CD/DVD and boot from that?

[Sn1pe]

Greetings to everyone.

I'm trying to re-install Windows XP from a recovery partition. I used to have Windows XP installed and when initially booting up it would have an option to press F11 to do a system recovery. Long story short, I don't have the XP installed anymore but I still do have the recovery partition backed up on a flash drive and I no longer have that F11 option which would just make things so easy, sorry. This is for an eMachine T5026. Is there a way to make that recovery partition into a bootable cd/dvd to install Windows XP? If not then, is there a way to just boot from it from the partition?

eMachine's doesn't encourage users upgrading their systems, which is how I ended up with this issue. Buying the recovery disks from eMachine's will be a last restort, so I'm trying to figure out all the possibilities before I do that.

Also, I can't seem to be able to make the recovery partition active so I can boot from it so I'm out of ideas. I did before but it got stuck in a loop mode trying to restore itself each and every time.

If anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

I assume you don't have the recovery disk.
Active partitions usually are the ones with your OS on it, you shouldn't make the recovery partition the active one; and I don't think you can boot directly from that partitions, thats not what its meant to do (I may be wrong about this). I also think that you need your restore disk to properly restore, and that the recovery partition does NOT have the necessary files.

eMachine's doesn't encourage users upgrading their systems, which is how I ended up with this issue. Buying the recovery disks from eMachine's will be a last restort, so I'm trying to figure out all the possibilities before I do that.

If you mean that you upgraded your computer...emachines probably doesn't care enough to stop you, they just didn't design their drivers and hardware to support it. By restoring to the original emachine version of windows, you will be applying all drivers that are specifically designed for your original emachine system, if you changed it, you may have to get rid of those anyway.

 

[Sn1pe]

I was told to make the recovery partition active so as to boot from that, so I was able to do so, it worked but then it got stuck in a continuous booting loop mode. Then I was told to mark the recovery partition un-active and that XP would boot normally then. That's the part where I got lost. I didn't know how to make the partition un-active and now I'm left with no OS and no recovered nothing. I do think about what you said about the partition not having all the necessary files, when I did manage to do a complete restore before, it gave me 2 options " Full Destructive " (formatting the hard drive and re-installing everything, ej, programs, drivers, etc) and Non Destructive where it would just restore factory settings without deleting any data. This is why I thought that maybe I could boot from the partition again and restore XP.

 

[Sn1pe]

I figured it out, answer is no. The files are not the same as a boot cd some how, although all the necessary information is in the recovery partition files. I was able to install a temp OS on another drive, re-connect the original drive with the recovery partition, mark it as active, disconnect the temp drive with the temp OS, let the computer restore the OS, turn off. Make primary partition active (which deactivates the other) and voila!

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

Oh nice that good...