How do I create my own hidden rescue partition?

[robotben]

Hello

I have an older compaq laptop with a dead cd rom drive.

Replacing the cdrom just doesn't seem worth it even though it would make my life a lot easier.

I can take the drive out of the machine and get into it via my desktop.

What I'd like to do is somehow create a hidden partition that I could boot from, and that would contain my windows install source.

Then I could boot from that partition and install to another partition on the same drive.

Please help!

 

[IBMan]

you could prolly make an image of ur HDD using norton ghost, copy that to a hidden partition and add a segment to your boot.ini file, i can't tell u much more but this seems feasable (SP?) to me, seems like it could work if you can figure out boot paths and such.

 

[BASSMASTER]

couldn't you just add a line of text in front of that segment on your INI file that would make the line unreadable. Then if your system ever crashed, you could just modify the INI file through DOS or the recovery console and reboot?

 

[office politics]

from how to create a restore/recovery disc and partition

When you buy a new computer you will usually get some sort of restore/ recovery disc. This is used to restore your operating system and software back to factory condition so your PC will run as it did when you bought it. This is usually done by saving an image of the partition where the OS & installed programs are located. The image is saved to a single file or split into a spanned set of files if it's total size exceeds FAT32's 4GB file size limitation. This guide will explain various ways to make a restore disc that you can customize and tweak to your needs. Since it uses Symantec Norton Ghost it can be used on just about any computer including those that are custom built or running Linux. The two main methods of doing this is by either storing the image on the hard disk or on a recordable disc. The advantage of storing the image to hard disk is faster speed and the flexibility of overwriting images. Very useful if you make frequent changes to your images. Ghost has the option of burning images directly to CD or DVD. The downside is that it requires the user to use the bootable floppy along with those discs. This tutorial will take it one step further and eliminate the need for a bootable floppy.

 

[robotben]

Thanks for the replies

I don't have a working install on the laptop right now.

I thought I could format and copy the install source to the drive and it would just work.

If anyone has a better way of doing this I'd like to know.

It seems like I need a working install to do the tutorial.