Need to access recovery partition - replaced HDD

Hi. My "google-fu" isn't giving me a solution so I hope someone here can help.
About a year ago my laptop's HDD started giving errors so I replaced it. As far as I can recall, I did it by cloning the drive (but I can't remember using which program). I got everything working just dandy at the time but recently I've been getting daily BSOD related to ntoskrnl and from what I've read the solution to this is to re-install Windows.

But that's where my problem comes in. When I try to run recovery I get a message saying
"Restore failed - can not find image
path:M:\D2D\Images\*SWM"

I've attached a pic of my disks diskman showing I have a 13Gb recovery partition, Acer (C) and System Reserved (which I gave a drive number to try and access).

The system reserved shows as having 62.5Mb free of 99.9Mb (so its not empty), but if I "explore" it shows "folder is empty".

So how can I get to the recovery file?


FWIW, D2D is enabled in bios, and I've tried Alt-F10 - the computer just beeps continuously until I let go then starts up normally.

Also FWIW, I do have my old HDD in an enclosure so I can "pull" data off that if necessary (but that system reserved also shows golder empty despite using up space).

Lastly I do have some recovery disks BUT I suspect they are from my previous Acer (had a OOB failure so I returned it for an upgraded machine so I'm not sure how valid they are and the Windows 7 serial I have will most likely not match so I'm really hesitant to use them).

Thanks in advance...

Hi DMHolt57.
So you're saying I can't get anything off this drive?
What about off the old drive? Although I've just plugged it in and it appears exactly like the current drive in that no "file system" shows up (I assume that's what you are referring to when you say it doesn't appear to be formatted?)

Hi whs.
I'll give that a try... I'll have to wait until I can access enough bandwidth so I won't mark it as solved yet...

Did you make your ACER Recovery disks?

@ mjf - thank you, I'm going to check out that program NOW!
@ theog - as briefly mentioned in the OP, I made recovery disks BUT I'm not 100% sure they are from this Acer or from a previous one that had an issue soon after I got it and was returned for an upgraded machine - hence I'm not sure how valid they and so I'm hesitant to use them...

Ok, I have downloaded and run partition wizard as per mjf's suggestion - it doesn't look like there's anything much in the recovery partition of the current HDD..
However in the original drive there is a bunch of stuff!
So I suppose the trick now is to ?? use PW to copy the stuff from the old to the new??