Clone HDD -=WITH=- The Recovery Partition

[memoryinmotion]

It's late as I write this - so I hope someone out there can help.

I am commissioned with the task of cloning a hard drive with a recovery partition (HP). So far everything has failed.

We're going from a 200 GB Western Digital to a 160 GB Seagate, and a number of freebies refuse to clone to a smaller drive.

The trial version of Acronis True Image cloned nicely, but there is no way to stimulate the restore partition to invoke using HP's F10 key. The owner of this computer has deemed this necessary.

So far I have tried:

Drive Image XML - This thing was 19% complete after over two hours, and this timeframe is not not acceptable.

CloneMaxx - doesn't do SATA (I forgot to mention, this is a SATA operation)

Clonezilla - fell into a failure loop

CloneHD - I forgot now - it may have been the one that refused to clone to a smaller drive.

I've been at this now for fourteen hours, so I really can't enumerate all the products I've tried.

Thank you very much in advance.

MiM

 

[jdean]

Don't have any experience with recovery partitions, but Casper XP would be the first program that I'd try for this job. Hope it works for you!

 

[memoryinmotion]

I won't have time to try that tonight, after reading the disclaimer: It will fill the entire partition with the active partition (effectively using the entire disk) - and while this is fine for testing purposes, It's not going to solve this problem in 9 hours.

I have downloaded it to test in the future.