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Copying the recovery partition to a new HD

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I have an Acer laptop that has a defective windows partition. I would like to buy a new HD and transfer over the hidden recovery partition from the old HD to the new HD, and use this recovery partition to reinstall windows on the new HD.  Can this be done with Acronis? If so, how?

I have acronis TI 2015 on my desktop computer, and can easily remove the old HD from the laptop and intall onto the desktop with a docking port to do all the work on the desktop.

I suspect that due to the nature of the HD failure (the partition cannot be formatted), cloning the entire drive will not be possible.

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Paul, welcome to these user forums.

You should be able to do what you ask by using Backup & Restore, assuming that the problem laptop HDD drive will allow the existing partitions / data to be accessed by the backup process.

The way I would try to approach this would be as follows:

  1. Remove the HDD from the laptop and connect it to your desktop computer via USB (dock or adapter).
  2. Attempt to remove the failed Windows partition on the laptop HDD and leave the space as unallocated.
  3. Use ATIH 2015 to make an entire disk & partitions backup to another drive on the desktop.  Do not use sector-by-sector backup mode.  Note: if attempting this encounters problems due to the bad partition, then make a backup of each partition in turn on the laptop HDD - make a note so that you know exactly what order these occur on the drive.
  4. Disconnect the laptop HDD and replace with a new drive.
  5. Use ATIH 2015 to restore either the entire disk & partition backup to the new drive, or else, restore each individual partition one by one in the correct order / placement on the drive.
    Note: Ensure you restore the MBR and Track 0 to pick up the links to the Recovery partition.