Laptop Recovery Hard Drive Replacement

Question

If I am upgrading the hard drive on a laptop, is it possible to transfer the "hidden" backup (recovery) partition for a Toshiba laptop to the new hard drive?

Answer 1

Sure, assuming that you want to keep ALL the partitions intact, you simply need either:

• a working system that you can attach both drives to simultaneously, and disk to disk cloning software (for example, Casper), or;
• a working system that you can attach the drives to one-at-a-time, and disk imaging software that you can use to make an image of the first disk and deploy it onto the second disk (for example, Ghost)
  • (You might be able to get away with just the laptop for this if your imaging software will let you image the drive that it's actually running off of, and you have some way of attaching the second hard drive to your laptop)

If you ONLY want to keep the recovery partition and have the Windows installation clean, I'd still recommend you do this, and then do a factory recovery on the new drive (or vice versa if you don't care about the contents of the original drive)