SC said:
*** Reply in line
*** When I put the new drive in my Gateway and restored the drive from an
image, the Recvery Partition was not included in that image (on purpose),
and I had to do nothing to any of the files to get it to boot. I just
restored the image, rebooted, and was back in Vista where I left off.
Maybe on an XP system changes would be necessary, but I don't recall
doing
anything special on any of Compaq and HP notebooks and PC's we had at
work.
And we ran XP on most of them except for a few older NT4.0 ones.
I'm not saying you're incorrect; just that I never ran into that
difficulty
or extra steps doing it the way I have been doing it for a number of
years.
The only difference I ever saw was the prompt at the bottom of the POST
screen about "Press Fxx to recover your PC" was gone, which leads me to
believe that the PC sees that partition before any boot loaders are
searched
for during the boot process, and if it is missing, the BIOS (or whatever)
doesn't display that prompt. Since I never ran into any problems with it,
I never delved any deeper into it.
SC Tom
Dell has two extra partitions on my HD, one for its "Utility Partition" at
the front of the drive, and one for its "Recovery Partition" at the end.
Also, Dell reportedly uses an MBR boot code "customized by Dell", which
can be an issue here.
Let's see what's going on...
The message I get at bootup, just after the BIOS screen, is:
Loading PBR for partition 2... (the PBR is evidently stored in #2)
And here is a copy of my boot.ini contents:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home
Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
So it expects Windows, or at least some boot loader code(?), to be in
"partition #2" (I'm a bit confused here as to which or what)
The partition ordering is like this:
#0 is the FAT Dell Utility Partition
#1 is the Windows Partition (NTFS)
#2 is the FAT32 Dell System Restore (DSR) partition.
And Dell reportedly uses a MBR boot code customized by Dell.
So if I removed the DSR partition, it would consequently change the MBR,
and I gather the boot loader would be upset. (I've run into something like
this before as I recall, but now I'm confused.