Hello! I'm attempting to help a friend restore her computer to it's original factory state. I'd like to replace the original hard drive with a new drive but she has no rescue disks or windows disks ~ only the recovery partition that came with her computer.
I've read various posts on the subject but none seems to solve this issue. Can I somehow use her recovery partition to install a factory-fresh OS? Possibly partition the new drive into 2 partitions, clone her recovery partition then copy that image onto her new drive? I'd do that but I have a feeling that I won't be able to boot to the "new" recovery partition. She currently has a 1 TB hard drive but only uses about 60 GB of it. . .I'd just clone the whole thing and nuke her current OS but I'd like to replace her current 1TB drive with a 500GB drive since it's really just wasted space. Is there a way to clone the entire drive, both partitions, to a new, smaller drive? Thanks in advance for your help!
I've read various posts on the subject but none seems to solve this issue. Can I somehow use her recovery partition to install a factory-fresh OS? Possibly partition the new drive into 2 partitions, clone her recovery partition then copy that image onto her new drive? I'd do that but I have a feeling that I won't be able to boot to the "new" recovery partition. She currently has a 1 TB hard drive but only uses about 60 GB of it. . .I'd just clone the whole thing and nuke her current OS but I'd like to replace her current 1TB drive with a 500GB drive since it's really just wasted space. Is there a way to clone the entire drive, both partitions, to a new, smaller drive? Thanks in advance for your help!