How can I recreate recovery partition on Gateway Notebook

Working on a friends Gateway MX series notebook. He lost recovery CD, so I reinstalled XP from an XP disc. Then found out recovery from recovery partition hadn't worked because that partition was fos (Full of S__t). So for safety, wiped it, too. Is there an easy way, without the original Gateway disc, to recreate the recovery system on that partition?

 

I don't think there is anyway to recreate a gateway recovery partition.

What you could do is use a backup product like Macrium reflect and create an image of the new install. It should only be a few GB for a fresh install of XP. Write that image to the old recovery partition and be sure to create the Macrium bootable disc and give it to your friend. Todo backup is another similar program that would work as well.

With either program it is essential that you create the bootable CD since he will need it to restore the image on a non-booting system. If he ran into trouble with his XP installation not related to HD failure he could boot from the disc and restore the image to the C: partition.

 

I would like to add something to sach2's suggestion. Using Todo Backup, create a system image and place it in the new partition you added. Todo has something called Pre-OS. Depending on if you download the Win AIK to create a WINPE disk or use the linux based disk, it will modify the MBR and when you first boot, a pre-screen will appear asking if you would like to boot to windows or Todo backup.This would not help if the hard drive failed but would work if you have a software problem. Before you decide to use it, I would recommend that you first see if the Bootable Recovery Disk created by Todo can see your drive. If it does see your drive, then using the Pre-OS will let you do a restore without using a boot disk.



http://www.todo-backup.com/support/help/pre-os.htm

One note about this. When restoring the C: partition, make sure you check the box next to C: and not disk because if you do that, the program will wipe out your partition you created to hold your system image leaving only the C: partition on your hard drive.