how to get Win 8 Recovery partition onto new hard drive

pawz7

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can anyone advise please? The hard drive has failed, we have a new hard drive to put in, but need to get the recovery partition from the old drive installed and enabled so we can 'refresh' and get the system back on. Whether it will work without needing to put in a PID I don't know - the folks got the machine with Win 8.00 pre-installed so have no disk or PID - but I said I would give it a go.
 
How to Create a Windows 8 Installation DVD or USB Drive

If you have the same "bitness" on your PC, 64 or 32 bit, then that link may be useful. If there's another way to get a Windows 8.x iso file I don't know it. Perhaps someone else will chime in if so.

Edit: I'm not sure but the USB option may give you the choice of 32 or 64 bit.

Edit2: You may want to point out, if the people you are helping are capable of using it, that the way to avoid his in the future is to get an external drive and image the HD to a file on it. There are free softwares like Macrium Reflect.

For a list of free imaging programs see The Free Country
 
edit: Download Windows 8.1 from Microsoft site. Note: The download succeeds without product key. This new Windows 8.1 installation media also accepts Windows 8 product key. Also the UEFI firmware (BIOS) embedded Windows 8 product key is automatically detected.

How to clean install Windows 8.1 if you have an OEM computer with UEFI firmware (BIOS) embedded Windows 8/8.1 product key? -> link
 
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I will save the link and give that a try Miles, though if it asks for a PID I will not have anything to offer - I understand that an OEM machine with Win8 pre-installed has the product key 'hardwired' into the BIOS, so maybe it would not be needed. I can but try.
Thank you for your help
 
genet, thankyou. I will see what can be done when the machine comes tonight. Edit noted and encouragement gained..
 
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If you had a Recovery Drive or a System Image Backup of some type, you might be able to recover the system to the new drive.

If you can access the Recovery Image partition on the old drive, be careful with it just in case you may need it later. But just copying over that image does not allow for a system recovery without some advanced knowledge of rebuilding a drive structure.

Downloading the .iso as suggested, if you can, would be a good solution.
 
thank you Saltgrass, that is helpful - I thought there might be more to it than simply copying. The .iso would be of Win 8 would it, and I could obtain it without putting product key in? Someone else suggested I download a MacriumReflect disk image. Perhaps there is hope then....
 
Someone else suggested I download a MacriumReflect disk image. Perhaps there is hope then....

Macrium Reflect is a disk imaging application. You would create an image of the old drive with it to restore to the new drive. Depending on the failure of the old drive, you may not be able to successfully image it. Teh best way would be to pull the old drive and use Macrium to image it from another machine, This will likely require enough drive space on this 2nd machine or an external drive to write the image to. Then you would use the same machine and/or external drive to restore the image to the new drive.

The absolute best scenario for this type of issue is to create regular disk images to prepare for these type of events. Then you have an image at the ready to restore.
 
I figured if I could just image the recovery partition using Macrium, I could put that on the new drive and then 'refresh' on the Win 8 machine to get the system on there - but someone has said that won't work...
 
If you can clone the old drive to the new one, you should be able to boot the new drive and go. No refresh or anything else needed.
I've done this when moving from a HDD to a SSD several times. HDD to HDD should be a piece of cake, unless the files on the old HDD are damaged, then a refresh may be needed.
 
I downloaded the 8.1 iso, installed that - after having to change the partition from MBR to GPT - and was not asked for PID, so 8.1 is now on there but no recovery partition - the .iso will have to do if needed in future
 
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the files on the C:drive were damaged Ztruker, so that was not going to work - but the .iso did :)
 
I downloaded the 8.1 iso, installed that - after having to change the partition from MBR to GPT - and was not asked for PID, so 8.1 is now on there but no recovery partition - the .iso will have to do if needed in future

That's where Macrium Reflect can help you. I keep 3 rotating backups, over-writing the earliest one. If things go south, you always have a recent image to restore. You'll need an external drive to keep them on.
 
yes, for your own computer, but this is someone else's. They can see to that. hopefully. :)
 
If your computer still recognize the disk, you could clone the whole windows 8 system partition to new drive. Or if you have any system backup, you could recover the system backup to the new hard disk with Macrium Reflect or EaseUS Todo Backup.

You could try, for I restored my system to SSD successfully. Good luck.
 
thank you Tommy. I agree with everything you say, and have used Macrium Reflect myself - and before that Acronis. however the C: partition on the disk of this current machine was not accessible, so that wasn't going to work - but it is all sorted now. I downloaded the 8.1 .iso and put that on a DVD, and ran that, fearful that I would be asked for the PID as the machine started life as Windows 8 - but it did not. As the machine is an OEM, it just read the PID from the BIOS and everything went smoothly.
 
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