Nah - the BIOS in most machines contains special code to access the Recovery partition, which relies on it being where it's expected to be (which may not be where any sensible person would put it).
Check your manual for teh instructions for use - and whether you can reinstart the old drive and attempt to burn a set of disks from that (I can't remember how stable your system was with the old disk in it?)
With the old disk in it as main drive, it wouldn't boot so I had to replace. I can connect the old disk to remove my data etc and when I go to disk management/disk utility in Ubuntu I can see the Recovery Partition. I am going to get Samsung Recovery Solution into my laptop for the meantime. I have read a few tutorials that seem to show SRS recovering factory status from an external drive, I think you need to navigate to it and it scans all disks to find what it's looking for.
If this is correct then I would be tempted to attempt:
1. Install Samsung Recovery Solution.
2. Connect old hard disk.
3. Attempt a factory restore by accessing the old disk and then completing the installation on my new stable drive.
Thanks.
A quick search found this. Scroll down to Replacing Recovery Partition Images
I don't want to mess everything up here. Before I do anything, should I get create an image of my current disk and burn to disc.
And only THEN... proceed to Method 2 in the link, hook up the drive, start up SRS and point it towards my old Windows 7 image on there? To be fair, I now have the image in my new drive so I can probably go ahead without it being there and just point to the folder I cloned the stuff into.
Not sure. Out of my depth. But desperately want to nail this lol
Be VERY careful following those instrcutions - they are for Windows XP, not for WIndows 7, and there's a world of difference in everything!
I can find no refernces in either that site or in Samsung's to such a procedure for your machine (which uses v4 of the recovery utility as far as I can make out).
You should contact Samsung and see if they can advise.
Bottled it!
Will see how I get on with Mr Microsoft on Monday and find out if Samsung can sort me out with recovery disc.
Amazing what you can learn in the space of a week though.
Not finding much info on Samsung discs being available but I did find a disc with what might be a recovery thing on it, made around the time I bought the laptop.
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