[dt_aiying]

Hello experts,

I'm a newbie when it comes to working with computer hardwares.

Please help me out here, I urgently need some advice and guidelines on how to proceed with solving a problem.

Here's the scenario:
I have two desktop IBM computers of the same model. A has lost its recovery / service partition, while B has a fully functional recovery / service partition.

I would like to restore A's recovery / service partition back (factory default setting) and to do that, I would like to use a SATA connection and connect these two computers together. This is so that the hard disk contents in B can be copied onto A.

How can I get this done? Details will be very much appreciated, as I do not know much about these hardware stuff.

Please help. Many thanks in advance!

[Law]

You mean using eSATA? I'm not so sure about that or any other external way of doing so.

There is another way, that is to take the hard drive from either computer and put them on the same system. Then get a hold of GPartEd live CD and use the copy function to copy and paste a partition to another hard drive.

GParted -- Welcome

Here is the documentation. GParted -- Documentation

[ShackledPhoenix]

Also with the working PC you should have the ability to make Recovery CD's, which you can then use on PC A to restore both the PC, and it SHOULD restore the recovery partition too.

The only other thing would be what law said, and To be honest, I'm not sure that would work. Would Gparted modify the MBR for that?

[Law]

You can always fix it with the Windows XP CD and fixmbr and fixboot command.

I also forgot to mention another great tool for cloning, it's CLONEZILLA!!!

Get it here Clonezilla

These tools are free and good to have around. I suggest using cloning for boot partition so you don't have to fix the MBR. Use copy from Gparted if you want to just quickly backup data on a regular partition to another HD.

*Edit* Just found out Gparted will not work if you try to copy a boot partition to another HD and boot off it. It only copy data, not boot sectors. Only way is to use fixmbr and fixboot.

Another way is to use dd. Boot into Gparted and close it to the terminal and use the command

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 count=1

Where hda is the IDE hard drive you want to copy from and hdb is the IDE hard drive you want to copy to. It should copy the first 512byte (MBR) to the other HD.

hda = IDE hard drive
sda = SATA/SCSI

so for SATA/SCSI, should be

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1

hda1 = First partition of IDE HD
sda1 = first partition of SATA/SCSI.

anything from #5 are logical drives

You get the point.