Transfer recovery partition

[jmhcs]

I have an HP Pavillion a1140n with what I believe is a bad hard drive. Diagnostics from Seagate pass with no errors and the OS (WXP Media) reloads by using the F10 Key. However, when updating the OS to SP3, the system hangs when "finishing update" is displayed. I have had this happen before and it is almost almost always a bad hard drive.

My question: The bad hard drive has 2 partition, one for running and one being the recovery partition. Can I partition a different drive into 2 partitions and copy the contents of the original drive into a partition of the new drive and expect it to be able to reload using the F10 key??

[Midknyte]

The recovery is usually a linux partition, so you can try an imaging app that supports linux. If it's a Seagate drive, try Disk Wizard (Seagate's Acronis True Image)

I don't think you would need to manually partition the drive before the transfer.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD