Will a USB-based recovery also restore the recovery partition?

[TekNinja81]

Hey folks,

I'm looking at hopefully picking up a Surface Pro in the near future, haven't yet decided on 64 or 128GB as I still need to decide how much space I'll truly need.

That said, one of my considerations has been whether or not to remove the recovery partition. I know it's easy to do as I've made the USB drive for my Asus VivoBook, but here's a question...

On older machines that used DVD-based recovery solutions, in most(??) cases using these discs would also restore the on-drive Recovery Partition. Is this also true if you restore from a W8-created Recovery Drive? I've never tried it yet.


The reason I ask is that while I'd probably like to free up that drive space, if I ever decide to sell the unit or that I don't trust a USB flash drive for recovery media, I might want to restore that partition. Has anyone been able to confirm this as being possible?

 

[Xiang Li]

I just did a restore, and the answer is no it wont.
go to a ms-store and use one of their machine to create a backup drive if u need to

 

[Michael Miles]

Just an FYI, i made the mistake of thinking it did. I did a reset. Then, i popped my thumb drive in to redo the recovery partition. After i completed destroyong my recovery flash drive, i had a problem, and needed a reset. MS wouldnt let me make a new drive from their machine in the store and insisted on swapping my device for a new unit, which I found odd, because this was all a software issue, no hardware issues. and with a shortage of 128 gig devices going around, you would think they would make sure to have recovery drives to reset systems at the store. quick easy and efficient as they all come out the box the same.... dumb MSFT.

 

[TekNinja81]

Have to say that's disappointing to hear. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but if I had wiped out the partition expecting to be able to restore it later without knowing this, I could wind up in a sticky situation as you did.

There's got to be a third-party program that'll effectively do this though, right? I imagine it's just a matter of copying the contents from the USB drive to a 2nd partition on the drive... though I know recovery partitions are usually marked in a certain way or as a certain File System type... plus need the boot manager to recognize it. Hmm..

 

[Xiang Li]

you can go to best buy/ staples to do it then, not to mention downloading the recovery image from internet. someone will soon put one online for sure

 

[jpw21683]

I assumed the recovery partion would be restored, so I already wiped the partition...oh well.

I dislike having a single, dedicated flash drive for this purpose. So after creating the recovery USB drive, I created an image of the drive using the free USB Image Tool. I now have the drive image saved on my home server, so it will be included in regular backups.

I can now format my flash drive and use it regularly. If I ever need to recover, I can easily restore the image to a USB drive.