Copying a Recovery Partition to USB

[Enzo500]

I'm having problems with my hard drive not booting into Windows. Specifically getting a, "A disk read error occurred" during start-up. I took the hard drive out and placed it in another computer as second hard drive. I noticed that hard drive was quite slow but OS file system was still intact. The recovery partition also showed up under hard drives. If I right-click on the recovery drive and click copy then paste on to a empty USB drive. Will I be able boot up from the USB Drive so I can reinstall to factory state on new hard drive?

Thanks

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

No, you can't copy a partition like that. And again "no" it wouldn't be any use to you on a USB pen drive anyway because the factory recovery program looks for the recovery partition on the internal hard drive. There's no way to re-direct it to another drive.

If it's still possible, you need to "clone" the entire hard drive to a new one of equal or higher capacity.
Free cloning software: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx