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I have a Samsung Notebook for a few years now, model NP305E4A, dualboot with Windows 7 (installed via 'recovery' partition) and Xubuntu 12.04.

Everything is running fine, but I am considering to get a SSD hard drive to improve speed (specially during Windows bootup). I intend to remove the DVD drive so I can have both hard drives running at the same time.

The thing is, how can I use (or copy) the recovery partition to install Windows on the new SSD drive?

Edit: Just to make it clear, I know how to create partitions since the good old days of DOS and 32MB hard drives. I just want to use the original Windows install bundled with my notebook.

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  • Can't you just boot windows and make a set of recovery media DVDs? There are other ways, especially since you are already familiar with Linux (and I assume gparted)?
    – acejavelin
    Commented Feb 23, 2016 at 21:11
  • Burning DVD's is out of the question, my DVD drive is not working so fine. The other ways are exactly what I am looking for, but how can gParted help it?
    – Giordano Bruno
    Commented Feb 24, 2016 at 0:18
  • Maybe you can try ntfsclone of ntfs-3g, since you got Xubuntu.
    – Tom Yan
    Commented Feb 24, 2016 at 10:20
  • Gparted can copy partitions. The problem is recovery efi expects it to be on the first disk, and to have the whole disk to itself when it restores. What is the end result you want for the drives, meaning what partitions on which drive and what will control boot (bios, grub, Windows boot manager)? Do you still have your recovery partition, because I've seen a lot of people delete it when setting up dual boot scenarios.
    – acejavelin
    Commented Feb 24, 2016 at 12:08

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I'd just image the whole drive with a tool that lets you resize as you're going to restore. Its in no means exhaustive, but I've typically done this with backups I've generated from veem endpoint backup (which I use on most systems) or macrium reflect free.

Since this is a one off macrium might work better - I don't have a system with a spare drive on hand to demonstrate. From memory, install the second disk in place of the DVD drive (I did it disk to disk on the desktop), select the clone option, adjust the disks to fit (and leave out any partitions you don't need) then try booting. Then run the recovery partition, or its contents as per usual.

This of course assumes you can run the recovery partition off the original disk - grub sometimes clobbers things.If so you'd possibly be able to get away with cloning the recovery partition and MBR, but I'm not too sure.

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