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Author Topic: Copying the Recovery partition to make recovery disks on 2nd machine?  (Read 3264 times)

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HikeonFridays

    Topic Starter


    Newbie

    • Experience: Experienced
    • OS: Windows XP
    Hi, everyone.

    I'm quite sure I found this on-line and that it's doable, but now that I need it, of course I can't find it!

    My computer-illiterate sister has an eMachines Windows Vista computer that will no longer boot either normally or in safe mode; it hangs on crcdisk.sys.  She didn't make recovery disks when she got the computer, and the recovery console that comes up when it tries to boot also hangs.  She believes that it was interrupted while running a Windows update, but she's not entirely certain about that. 

    Anyway, her primary concern was recovering her pictures and documents, and I was able to do that by booting off a bootable Ubuntu CD.   Thus she now has everything she needs from that computer.  Before we take the sledgehammer to it, I want to fiddle with it and see whether I can get it booting into Windows off of the hard drive again so she can use it again, even if only for going on-line and not for saving precious stuff.

    I thought I read somewhere that if the recovery partition was readable (as it -- and the rest of the hard drive -- seem to be) that you could copy it up onto an external hard drive, then create recovery CD's on a different computer, but I can no longer find the instructions on how to do that.  Is that do-able, and if so, can I do it on an XP computer, or do I need to use a Win7 computer (I don't have a Vista computer).  Can I do it right off of the external hard drive, or do I need to copy the partitions down to a fixed hard drive?  And if so, do I just create directories in C:, so as not to overwrite the D: recovery partitions in the computer I'm copying down to?

    Thanks for any insights.  I don't have precise model number or Vista version at my disposal at the moment, but if needed, I'll have that info tomorrow morning.