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I have upgraded the HDD in a Samsung laptop and would like to restore the "Press F4 for recovery" partition.
My new disk has three partitions, System, Windows, and Recovery. I did a dd of the recovery partition from the old HDD to the new. I also set the diag flag on the new HDD. F4 recovery still is not working.
tldr: I mapped my new disk like my old disk with the exception of exact sizes. I did the recover partition from old to new via livecd. F4 recovery does not work.
user974896
Posted 2012-09-18T12:36:43.590
Reputation: 229
@user974896 Okay I'm not one to dig up old threads but could you provide a link to the tool you used? I'm in the same situation and it would really help. Thanks! – Qub1 – 2015-07-26T18:40:33.583
1Did you duplicate the original hdd sector by sector or only selected partitions. It sounds like the process you used was incorrect. – Ramhound – 2012-09-18T12:44:37.190
The selected partition. The new hdd is smaller. I did "dd if=/dev/sdc3 of=/dev/sda3 BS=512". Why would you have to clone the entire disc? You should be able to split or trash your windows partition and have it still work – user974896 – 2012-09-18T13:05:55.897
You clearly did something wrong, because it doesn't work, which is the reason I would copy the entire disk. – Ramhound – 2012-09-18T13:52:40.213
Did you figure out how to restore the recovery partition? I basically want to do the same thing, only I want to back up the recovery partition on an external drive before deleting it to free up some space for linux while keeping the possibility of recovering win. On samsung support, they say it is impossible to recreate the recovery partition, however, it is unclear to me whether this is just to scare people from doing it, or if it's actually impossible. – bobbaluba – 2012-09-30T04:39:41.530
I got it. I am going to do a writeup and post all the tools. I basically found this Samsung utility that is a boot-able version of Samsung Recovery. Using that I can repartition the HDD to Samsung's liking. It installs a base recovery environment and restores press f4 ability. Then I installed windows and used linux to copy the original recovery partition back (on a file level, not dd). Check back here in a few weeks. – user974896 – 2012-10-04T16:42:03.857
I guess it's been a few weeks now. But perhaps your F4 never actually worked before your swap? – not2qubit – 2014-02-26T22:08:46.857