How to copy Dell recovery partition
Dell Inspiron N5030 with W7 Home. The disk drive is failing but I think the recovery partition on the drive may be OK. Is there a way for me to create a factory set of DVDs off of the recovery partition so that I can replace the drive and create a new OS? I already have the data backed up via Carbonite so I think I'm OK there. I've tried a W7 System Image as well as a Boot It image and neither will complete the image because of bad sectors.
ASKER
I see that there is a Recovery partition (14.65GB) via CP and Disk Management. However, I don't know how to access the files in the partition. While attempting to create an image with W7 System Image, the recovery partition appears to copy OK but when Sys. Img gets to the C partition, it stops with errors. It is apparent that my bad sectors are in the C partition area. Can someone suggest how I access the Recovery Partition to copy the .wim files?
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All of these were good suggestions. Ultimately, I was able to boot to the bad drive and was able to eventually get access to some of the data and simply copied it to a new drive. I was also able to recreate the operating system on the new drive. Therefore, even though I was not able to completely restore the data, we've retrieved enough to close this case. Thanks to all that responded.
If so, you should be able to copy it to a same-size partition (reproducing the original path \dell\image\ on the recovery partition) on the new hard drive, then once you have any version of win7 installed (or can even boot from BartPE disc if you made one before this happened) and can see the new recovery partition, you should be able to run
imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:
where "d:" is the drive letter of the recovery partition and "c:" is the drive where you want the factory image restored TO.
After that, if you installed a larger drive and the recovery changed the size of the main partition you should be able to boot from GParted Live and use that to expand it back to the original size.