HP Recovery partition

I'm having a real hard time trying to get a laptop I am working on to boot from the recovery partition after restoring the recovery partition from a partition image.

The hard drive failed however the recovery partition was accessible. Made in image of the partition, replaced the HD, restored the partition and the machine will no longer boot from the partition. It attempts to but then just locks up.

Imaged the recovery partition from an identical rig and after restore same thing. Then I cloned the whole drive from the identical rig. It will boot to the OS, but not to the recovery partition.

Before I go nuts, does HP do something in regards to some type of special format or something with their recovery partitions?

Should this work and I did something wrong or is there something HP does to make sure the recovery partition can not be imaged & restored?

Sorry about the noob question.

 

I think the MBR may be altered to allow booting to the recovery partition.

Have you tried restoring the MBR from the "identical" notebook as well as the recovery partition?

 

Is one of your backups one where you checked the disk option so the backup included all partitions--both recovery & system? If yes, then I would do a disk option restore and restore the entire disk ( all partitions--both recovery & system together at once.)

The restore should be done from the Rescue CD(or equiv) and the target should be placed in its intended boot position before restoring.

 

I did clone the whole hard drive of the identical machine (both recovery & data partitions) and it would'nt boot to the recovery partition with the cloned drive. It would boot to the data partition though.

With this rig, if you hit the F11 key during post, it is supposed to boot to the recovery partition. You could tell it would try, but then the machine would lock up.

The rescue CD's were never made by the owner on the rig with the failed drive and they were made from the identical rig but not available and you are only allowed to make one set. That's the reason I needed to recover from the partition.

I tried every which way to get a working recovery partition to no avail.

I finally was able to make recovery DVD's from the working rig & HD. I figured out what I needed to do to allow another set of DVD's to be made by the recovery manager.

I used the DVD's to recover the rig with the failed drive (now a new drive). The drive was still cloned. I did'nt erase the partitions before I used the recovery DVD's.

After the DVD recovery was complete, the rig would now boot to either the data partition or the recovery partition. I have no idea why. The DVD recovery must rewrite the recovery partition then recovery the data partition from there.

This is the first time that a partition image or drive image wouldn't work. That why I was wondering if HP did some sneaky stuff to keep the recovery partition from being imaged / restored.

Thanks for the help.

 

If you wanted to redo the clone.

Put the target in its intended boot position.
Install the old drive in an alternate location such as external or other internal.
Reboot into the TI Rescue CD
Redo the clone. Retain recovery partition in the exact same size---do not allow a change of size.
Remove the old drive before first bootup.