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| I don't know if this will help you or not but I'll share my experience trying to partition a factory dell hard drive that I had on my XPS 1330 laptop.
I wanted a triple boot. I wanted to have Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux on the computer. I did NOT want the Dell recovery partition on the machine for several reasons. It proved to be quite difficult to remove. After a lot of research I ended up downloading KillDisc which is a program that allows you to boot directly to the program using the CD drive just like what you would do if you were installing Windows. KillDisc (KillDisk? I don't remember) would then write 1's and 0's to every single piece of the hard drive, destroying even the hidden Dell recovery partition that no other tool I was able to find could manipulate.
After that I was able to partition it and treat it as I wanted. I suspect you're running in to similar "hidden recovery partition" errors. I could not touch that partition, even with GParted, the Linux partition management tool.
If you're really wanting to make this work, I would back everything up in a more normal manner than what you're suggesting just this once, make sure you have all the drivers downloaded for your computer and download the Windows 7 .iso so that you can create a DVD to re-install Windows. Then run something like KillDisc (I imagine it's still available) and then re-install and try to make an image of your hard drive again. Good luck. | |
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Hard drive cloning Windows 7 ?
