Burning Dell restore partition to disk?

[dendawg]

Hey folks,

I'm about to buy a new hard drive for my dinosaur laptop (Inspiron B130) and am looking for a way to copy the restore partition to DVD's. I do have a restore CD, but it's only Win XP, and not the actual restore partiton. I've tried to explore the partition and it's invisible, and I'm out of ideas as to how to actually view the files. Is there any way I can do this, short of a Linux live CD? Thanks in advance.

[SteeleDragon78]

some new drives come with a cd for mirroring the contents of the drive being replaced. if your new drive has that you should be able to clone the old drive into the new drive and may have the option of cloning the restore partition as well.

[emax4]

If you have a restore CD, that will work. The restore partition is probably just reserved with the same stuff that gets put on from the install CD anyway. Is your OS Windows 7? I'm not getting why you would want to put the restore partition on CDs or a DVD if you already have a restore CD. If you went from XP to 7, the restore partition will most likely reinstall XP as that was what it came with. I don't see a manufacturer have a restore CD from Windows 7 down to XP though.

[Sandman]

some new drives come with a cd for mirroring the contents of the drive being replaced. if your new drive has that you should be able to clone the old drive into the new drive and may have the option of cloning the restore partition as well.

He would have to purchase an enclosure first since he has a laptop.