Activation issue after clean install on new hard drive

See if you can Explore the partition in Disk Mgmt.

gregrocker said:

See if you can Explore the partition in Disk Mgmt.

Was just about to ask how I do that until I realised by selecting other partitions and exploring them, that it's not an option on the Recovery.

Might be mistaken but those files I'm looking for... when I was using Disk Utility in Ubuntu I am fairly sure I saw very similar sounding files and *think* i was able to explore when using that. I will pop in the CD and find out, grabbing some screenshots of anything that looks useful.

Did you look in the Recovery folder for the files needed to possibly add Recovery to a Dual Boot menu? Boot Recovery Partition using EasyBCD

I don't need to assign a Letter to the drive name before I can use Easy BCD?

No, read the steps. Assigning a letter was only suggested to see files in Explorer, but you have found a way to view them otherwise.

See if the EasyBCD mini-explorer can find the specified files to add.

Ahhh I see. Okay I need to boot back into Windows, I don't know if and how to install Easy BCD on Ubuntu. Things do seem more transparent on this side of the fence tho.

The two files I need, I take it it has to be a complete match? I browsed through the folders in Recovery and go deep enough to find Windows, System32 etc so Ill boot up and see what I find. Great tutorials, Thanks again.

You should install EasyBCD to attempt booting Recovery from Win7.

You'll likely have to reimage Recovery onto the same HD to get it to restore the new HD, however beforehand you can test whether it will add to Dual Boot menu from where it is, then even boot it to see what options it gives you.

Will attempt in the morning, muchly appreciate your assistance.

If using EasyBCD gets you to the point where you can dual boot, but then you find the old recovery partition doesn't let you restore to the new drive, I think your best bet would be attempting to clone your old disk to the new.

I think if the cloning process can successfully transfer at least the first 15 GB or so of bit-by-bit data you might be in good enough shape even if it fails later on (that'll grab the old MBR, the data after it, and your recovery partition).

I don't have much experience with Macrium and am not sure if it can also do disk-to-disk cloning. I use other software for this type of task (Clonezilla).