Best way to copy a recovery partition?

[ArisVer]

Hi. What would be the best method to copy the recovery partitions that are usually found in notebooks, without removing the disk? I'd like to do that in case of HDD failure.

I can do an exact copy using a partition wizard but that needs an empty disk. The only other way I can think of, is booting from a live linux distribution and copy from there.

 

[kommisar]

dl clonezilla, burn to cd, boot from cd, clone partition to usb stick.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

 

[tcsenter]

Check the PC for an app or utility provided by the OEM for creating your own recovery media. Some still offer this (some don't). e.g. Toshiba still ship their computers with recovery media creator utility. IIRC, you can create to a USB thumb drive, DVD recordable, some will even permit creating ISO files.

Microsoft also has specified a "standard" way or guidance to OEMs for arranging recovery partition schemes, which permits an easy way to make a working backup of the recovery partition. If the PC shipped with Windows 8 or 8.1 (not all OEMs conform with this guidance), see:

Create a USB recovery drive

I'm not sure if this, when used for restore purposes, will recreate everything as it was when the PC shipped, including the OEM bundled applications, or just the install bits for Windows.

 

[corkyg]

What I do is to clone the laptop drive to an external drive. I also have a duplicate OS drive for the laptop, and, when I got it new, I cloned the original HDD to SSD and then removed the original HDD. That remains "factory new." The Recovery partition then becomes a non-issue.

 

[ArisVer]

Thanks for your thoughts. As I said I can clone the disk but that requires an extra disk and I don't have many.
I tried for practice the EaseUS Todo Backup Free utility using their bootable version and copied my own recovery partition into a single file and I hope this works out. I want to do that to three notebooks belonging to family as they don't have any recovery discs included.

As far as creating recovery CDs, one of the laptops (HP) is running Vista and when I tried to do those, the message was something like "you can only do one set of discs and it has been done". I will have to check on the other two.

Edit. The second laptop (Dell) is running Windows 8.1 so I can use the method described in the link provided by tscenter, which is a nice feature and I didn't know it existed. The third one is a Toshiba on Windows 7 and I hope it has the recovery media creator utility.