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Stephen714

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October 10th, 2008 08:00

Can the Dell restore partition be reinstalled?

I am about to replace the hard drive on my Dell Latitude D820 and have all the discs that came with the computer.  When I install Windows on the new hard drive, is there any way to reinstall the Dell recovery partition?  I don't want to clone the old drive because of too many error messages and prefer to start out with a clean install of Windows XP Pro.  Thanks!

ejn63

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87.5K Posts

October 10th, 2008 09:00

Not as such, but you can purchase a copy of Acronis True Image or Symantec Ghost and make your own images.  I would strongly suggest making them to an external hard drive - the point of imaging is to have a fail-safe way to restore the system if the drive fails, so it's not wise to put the image on the drive itself.

 

Stephen714

21 Posts

October 11th, 2008 21:00

Thanks for the suggestion.  I have Acronis and could do that.  I do get a lot of error messages with something like 'data could not be written/data could not be read' and am not sure the current drive is in the best of condition.  Would I be copying disk problem area data if I did Ghost the drive?  Is there any way to clone just the recovery partition and restore that after Windows is installed on the new drive?  If possible, would it have to be done with the drive image part of Acronis?  Any reason I can't just use Roxio software and copy that partition totally and then reinstall it to new drive?   Or, better yet, just use Windows Explorer to copy the partition to an external drive and then copy it back to the new drive? Thanks! 

ejn63

1 Rookie

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87.5K Posts

October 12th, 2008 12:00

If you're seeing those errors, don't even bother cloning - start with a fresh install on the new hard drive.  Back up your data and copy it to the drive when you're done.

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