Can I transfer a recovery partition to a new hard drive

My hard drive has failed and unrepairable but the recovery partition is still good
I have just bought a new hard drive and I'd like to transfer the recovery partition across
I have the use of another computer and a hard drive caddy
Can anyone help me with advice on doing this so that it will work when installed in the laptop
It's a Toshiba Satellite C660-116 with license for Win 7 Home premium OA

 

The HDD that I removed is a 250Gb Toshiba. The new one os a 250Gb Seagate
Is that likely to be a problem?

 

I'm a bit puzzled here. If the hard disk has failed how can you know that the recovery partition is OK and how could it possibly be copied to another drive? Do you actually mean it can no longer boot Windows? A bit more info on the symptoms might help here.

 

If you have the Recovery DVD's, if all else fails, you will have them to restore the image back to the new drive. Always have a backup plan, if the Backup image fails to move the info from the old unit to the new unit.

If your old drive is no longer working, and you do not have a backup image already of what was on it, you are going to have to do a full install of everything, and hope you have copies of any documents, videos, movies, music, photos somewhere else.

I have learned over the years, to never keep the later on my local drive, but keep a copy on my NAS on my LAN, and also on a couple of Cloud Drives, so that I have a way of restoring those items, or access them if I need to.

 

I haven't worked with Win 7, but did a transfer operation on Win XP. My "old" hard disk wasn't broken, but I wanted to install a larger drive (using the same size drive is recommended and for people not tech oriented may be the best way to go).

Acronis is a good recommendation. I used it for the transfer operation - it’s not free, but worth the price, since it is a good back-up utility.

I purchased a kit, the one I got had "no particular brand name", but worked for the job. The kit includes:
- a power supply,
- a two-sided connector, one side for SATA one for PATA drive connection (since I have moved my office, I can't find the package, right now). The connector plugs-into a USB port on the computer.
Be sure not to touch any exposed electronics on the new or old drive - it could cause problems. I set my new drive on its back, on a clean, non-conductive surface while doing the work, though you will likely have the new drive in the machine and the old one outside, and boot from the Acronis CD.

You may want some software that can adjust partition size and parameters, such as boot status - depending on what you are going to do with the new drive, especially if you are moving to a larger capacity drive.

There should be some literature - try the computer manufacturer's web site - that describes the recovery area and its features (size, boot status, etc.). And, likely will give some advise about installing on a new disk. Be sure the new drive has the capability of supporting a recovery partition, some don’t, especially older models.

I was essentially "cloning" my old drive, with all the apps intact, but into a larger disk, so I needed a lot of info and did a number of things you may not need to do with partitioning, etc.

Best wishes.