Recovery Drive Letters

[TES-1550]

I have an HP Pavllion 570-p0xx computer in which I replaced the original 128GB SSD with a 250GB SSD.

I created an image file to transfer from the old drive to the new drive.  Then I used a partition program to move the Windows RE tools drive to the end of the end, and enlarged the C drive to use all the new space.  Unfortunately, the recovery drive letter was lost by the image file.  (Stupid me; that is one thing I didn't write down before removing the old drive.)  There are five sections to the disk:

unallocated,                  1MB

FAT32                         260MB

Other                             16MB

WIndows drive C     231.66GB

Windows RE tools   980MB

(The Windows drive and Windows RE tool drives are both NTFS file system.)

I think the Windows RE tools should be Drive X, and the FAT32 and Other have no drive letters.  This that correct?  Should anything be done with the small unallocated space, or leave it as-is?

Thanks for the help.

[WAWood]

@TES-1550 

Sorry, not going to work.  I have run into this myself more than once and concluded that the HP recovery partition has to be located at a specific location on the drive.  If you completely image the drive, keeping the partitions, their sizes, and locations intact, this will work -- as I have done that myself more than once.  But if you change anything, it will not work.

What might work is if you CLONE the original drive to the new one, retaining all the original partition information. 

Then, you can enlarge partitions but do not do anything that moves or changes the Recovery partition location.

[TES-1550]

Thank you for the quick response, WA.

Maybe I wasn't clear; I did IMAGE (caps for emphasis, not yelling at you), the drive, and then burned the image to the new drive, so I maintained the original partition information.  (Macrium Reflect was used.)  The Windows Recovery Tools partition was then MOVED to the end of the drive (size maintained), to create a continuous space in which to expand drive C.  (EaseUS partition was used for this.)

I couldn't clone the disk; Reflect wouldn't recognize the flash drive to do this.  (But Reflect did recognize it for imaging.  Strange)

Also, in case it is of significance, we are talking about the RECOVERY TOOLS partition and the other partitions on the SSD, not the RECOVERY partition, which was (and is) drive E on the regular [spinning platters] hard disk and was thus unaffected by the SSD swap.

I thought two of the SSD partitions (Windows, and I'm guessing the Recovery Tools) had drive letters assigned to them, so I'm trying to make sure all drive letters are set as they were before the swap.

Thanks again for the help.

[WAWood]

@TES-1550 

Sorry for the confusion .. I missed the the details. 

But what you can try, which is what I have done, is imaging the entire drive (which I believe you said worked) and then Restoring the new drive from that image.  That is essentially the same as cloning, just a two-step process instead of one.  

[TES-1550]

Thanks again for the reply.  But my questions still remains.  Are those other partitions on the SSD drive supposed to have drive letters associated with them, and if so, which ones and what letters?

[WAWood]

@TES-1550 

The small partitions are rounding issues and will not have letters assigned.  The larger ones, when cloning is done, will retain the same letters as the original. The OS drive will automatically be assigned "C" -- don't know about the others.

[TES-1550]

Thank you for the response WA.  I think we may be about done, but to confirm things:

unallocated,            1MB                 "rounding error"; no drive letter; leave as-is

FAT32                  260MB                 contains "something", but has no drive letter assigned

Other                     16MB                  "rounding error"; no drive letter; leave as-is

WIndows drive C  231.66GB         boot drive, drive letter C

Windows RE tools 980MB            contains 500 MB of "something" relating to the system recovery,

                                                             but should have no drive letter assigned. 

                                                             remove assigned drive letter X from this partition(?)