7.7 disaster recovery of hidden partitions?

[vandellen]

What do I need to do in advance so I could replace the system boot drive on my Dell Dimension 5150 Windows XP PC using Retrospect Prof 7.7’s disaster recovery CD if I ever had to?

 

The drive includes two hidden, unnamed partitions in addition to the “C:†partition. I think the 55MB FAT partition contains boot software while the 4.63GB FAT32 partition contains Dell’s System Recovery software. How do hidden partitions get included in a Backup/Restore? Are they included automatically if “Local Disk (C:)†is selected as the Source?

 

If they are included automatically, is there some way to exclude the recovery partition? I don’t know why it’s needed if I’m going to use Retrospect for disaster recovery. “Preparing Your Hard Disk Drive for Recovery†on page 4 in the EMC Retrospect 7.7 User’s Guide Addendum points out that you might want to change the partition structure on the new disk while the 2nd WARNING on page 6 says Retrospect will recreate the exact partition structure if the dataset includes a recovery partition. (How does Retrospect know whether a hidden partition is a recovery partition?)