Recovery portion on drive D:?

E

EINREB

Member
I have a computer where the recovery portion is on the Hard drive, indicated as drive D:. To be able to use it I have to push F12 at power up. It will than direct me to a window that will enable me to recover or repair the System OS if needed. The section does not show up anywhere as a Recovery Device and I have two questions about it:
1. What do I do if the Drive fails totally and thus will not power up anymore, and
2. Everything works fine, but I want to install a bigger drive? (The drive is 160GB, but I like to replace it with a 500GB or 1TB HD I have available from another project.)
 
2. You clone the drive from smaller to bigger.

1. If drive dies then you are out of luck. Will need to order recovery cd from laptop maker or depending on what OS is installed could use an iso file to reinstall.
 
John's answer is the good one.

Usually you'll use the recovery partition for issues at an OS level, but it doesn't offer you any hardware redundancy.
 
Depending on the cloning software, it might not pick up everything from the recovery partition, rendering it useless.

You might be able to find the recovery software on your computer's brand website and re-setup that recover partition on your new drive. (I know Asus does that for their laptops, but not sure about the other OEM manufacturers)
 
johnb35 said:
2. You clone the drive from smaller to bigger.
Click to expand...

That was the answer I was looking for, but how do you do that? I assume you hook the two drives together somehow and start to copy the info from one to the other? This computer is one of those small HP desktop computers, with no provisions for adding components, except for a low profile card. Can I clone a HD in an other computer with lots of room?
 
Usually when you buy a new drive sometimes it includes cloning software or say you buy a new western digital drive you can download their cloning software (acronis true image) and clone the old drive to the new one. If its a seagate drive, you can use disc wizard.
 
Samsung also have their own cloning software. (For their SSD drives atleast)

+1 on the WD cloning software. Used it before and it was really easy to use.
 
johnb35 said:
Usually when you buy a new drive sometimes it includes cloning software or say you buy a new western digital drive you can download their cloning software (acronis true image) and clone the old drive to the new one. If its a seagate drive, you can use disc wizard.
Click to expand...

Thanks fellows! I remember vaguely reading something enclosed about cloning when I bought my new drives, but did not pay too much attention to it since I was doing fresh OS installs anyway.
I do have an Arconis True Image Version 11 Home CD. Use it for all my system backups, but did not realize that it had cloning software. Have to see how to use it.
 
UPDATE- My version of Arconis has indeed a program to clone an HD, but it assumes that there are two Drives in one computer, of which one has to be cloned. My computer has no room or provision for an other drive, it is one of those small HP desk Compaqs, which has just enough space to contain the minimum parts to work as a Computer, i.e. an Optical Drive, one (SATA) Hard Drive, a power supply and an small Motherboard. (Model HP Compaq DC5800 Small Form Factor). The question is, can I clone the drive in an other computer which has the capability of multiple (SATA) drives?
 
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