Backup and Recovery of HP OEM Recovery Partition
Is ATI 2012 compatible with backing up and recovering the HP recovery partition? If so, which specific settings are required for this to be successful. The reason being is that when I first purchased my notebook, before ever letting Windows boot, I made an image of everything (ATI 2010 at the time), and later needed it. The recovery was "successful" as in the OS booted as expected, no problems at all, and all the partitions were there and sized correctly. I wanted to test the factory recovery, so I restarted the notebook, pressed F11, and the HP recovery program started. Went through all the screens and choices, but then once it was about to start the recovery process, it mentioned there was an error and was unsuccessful.
The good news is that the OS recovered perfectly and allowed me to recreate recovery discs, which formatted the entire drive, removing all partitions, and recreating the recovery partition.
All I know is that I just made a generic backup using ATI, no sector-by-sector or backup blank space, etc. And wonder if that is why the factory recovery failed, or what. As mentioned already, I am looking to see if it is possible to completely backup this partition, and if so, how do you do it exactly? I need to know this because I am trying to fix someone's notebook and want to make sure that if the drive fails, I will have luck as they don't have any recovery discs that I am aware of. Thank you.
Thanks for the info, that will help when it comes to recovering (if I need to), however, what about any specific settings for the backup? When I did this with my computer, the HP partition wasn't successful, even though the "recovery" was in that the factory recovery process noticed that the partition was "messed with" and wouldn't continue. So I don't know if it matters if I choose sector-by-sector, sector-by-sector and empty space, or if any type would have worked.
As another issue, unfortunately, I can't seem to get the backup to work at all. Yesterday, I tried doing sector by sector and empty space, but that froze saying 8 hours for 5 hours, then tried again with sector by sector, without the empty space option, same results, and then today, I tried just a standard backup of the drive without compression, and when it was nearly done, saying 2 minutes left, it also just stopped. I am currently trying one last time with none of the options selected with no compression and ignoring bad sectors. It's been going for about a couple of hours now, and still says 32 minutes. I know that the time left can be viewed as inaccurate as it deals with the read/write rate of the drives, conditions of the sectors, etc, but I know that as long as I keep seeing the time go up and down, that it is probably okay.
That's curious. I've done full disk backups and full disk restores on many Dell computers, each of which contains two special Dell partitions in addition to the normal OS partition. I've never had a problem, and the Dell partitions and OS work as expected after the restores.
The HP notebook in reference was an HP Pavilion DV9700 CTO, tricked out, $4,500 new. Vista Ultimate x64 was the factory installed OS, with 2 physical 7200rpm hard drives. The first disk had two partitions, the first partition was the HP recovery partition, labeled HP RECOVERY, the second partition was labeled OS, then the second hard drive had a single partition labeled USER DATA.
From the experience of this notebook, I am trying to do things differently on the notebook I am repairing, however, I am wondering if the drive could be bad. Trying a basic disk backup one last time, and then it's time to see what Spinrite can do.
So I guess I am asking if it really matters or not if I do sector by sector to make sure that the recovery partition is in good shape should I need to restore.