You'll need to apply the old Recovery partition to a part of the HD where it doesn't interfere with Win7, which is necessary for it to be added to the Boot Manager so it can boot.
For this reason it may be best to use Macrium as planned since it offers more flexibility in what you can image (Recovery) and where you can restore it (space you create at right end of new HD).
Had a problem trying to brose EasyBCD to the boot.wim file on Recovery. Well, actually it wouldn't browse to Recovery at all since it wouldn't show up in EasyBCD at all.
I think I've managed to clone the Recovery Drive and put it in a folder in my C: which makes it searchable and I can browse to the boot.wim file but... something tells me that booting from a folder in my C: drive isn't a safe distance from Windows 7.
When you say I can use Macrium to place the Recovery at 'the right end' of the new HD, where would that be?
In a 20gb space you shrink from C.
You should consult SIW2 by PM on this thread as he is the expert on doing this.
I was thinking more along the lines of blowing away your recent install (and contents) on your new disk by applying a clone to it from your old disk. Then disconnect your old drive and attempt the recovery (which should auto-activate).
Your new disk will likely appear to have the same capacity as your old disk after the clone/recovery (because of cloning) but you would then just go into Disk Management or Partition Wizard to adjust your partitions and sizes the way you want to utilize the "lost" space.
I have done it with a Dell and a Sony.
The principle is the same - the details vary depending on what the oem has done with it's recovery media.
Not too hard - took me about 1/2 hr in both cases.
Of course, I had the machines in front of me.
Finding out long distance what the oem setup is on your machine - and trying to explain it, would be quite a task.
What part of the country are you in?
I need to have a look at the recov partition contents to figure it out.
If I knew someone with the same machine - I could look at theirs - but no one springs to mind who has one - most folk I know have macs.
This kind of thing is interesting.
I can provide screenshots etc if it helps.
I'm in Edinburgh.
Just got off the phone from Microsoft... well got cut off and I don't think I'm gonna get any help there. Told the guy what the problem is and he referred me to Samsung for disks that they say they don't give out. He said he can't give me a product key if it was already installed.
Oh and I've done a bit of homework. Since I have the files etc saved into a folder on my new drive, I understand I may be able to 'shrink' my C drive in disk management, place the files in there and then it will dual boot?
Or does the dual boot thing come first?
Contents of the Recovery folder
If you are in Eburgh - we will have to try it long distance.
That screenie looks promising.
Need to see the entire contents of the "sources" folder.
Ther should be at least two .wim files in there.
They may have split install.wim into several split wim files.
Hopefully, they will have either the .wim or the .swm extension - if they have used a different extension, they may have changed the headers.
The sources folder contains boot.wim file.
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