Resolved Recovering Windows 7 on ASUS laptop

I have a spare harddrive thats 75 GBs. I have a 500GB harddrive in my ASUS laptop that I want to exchange for the 75 GB one so I can use the 500GB drive as a back up drive for my desktop. I tried installing win7 home premium from a plain install DVD but it wont take my windows serial key because its OEM and not a plain install key.

I don't want to pay for recovery cd's and I'm pretty sure asus probably wouldn't even supply them to me anyways. I do have a recovery partition on the original drive that i tried to clone onto the 75GB drive but when i try to boot and restore from that i get windows could not find RECOVERY.DAT and big red text on a white background that says ERROR. (i assume this is some anti-piracy measure)

Do i need to mess around with some boot settings in a command prompt to get this to work? Can I run the recovery on the recovery partition from Windows? What are your guys thoughts. Thanks for the help

Regards,
kmstrube

 

Did you look and make sure that the key you have is actually the one on the laptop? Not the one on the sticker, but what is installd? Belarc Advisor which is free will tell you the Key #.

 

Mr Bill,

I retrieved my key using magical jelly bean keyfinder because the oem cdkey sticker has rubbed out and is illegible anyways. I went ahead and tried Belarc and got the same key so it wasn't any jelly bean shenanigans but i much prefer belarc so i'll use that from now on. Thanks.

I can't figure out why the recovery partition on the original drive works fine but the clone doesn't. I'm just gonna have to do it the long way i guess. I'm backing up my necessary files a third HDD and then I'm going to recover the original HDD back to factory because the recovery partition still works on that drive. It should be small enough after that to clone to the second HDD. Its annoying in general as moving all the files is gonna take like 2 days but whatever.

 

Update-
I was able to get things to work. I went ahead and backed up my files on a third drive, recovered the 500gb drive and was able to clone it onto the 75gb drive and then recover that drive. Kind of a work-around but I was able to accomplish what I set out to do. Lesson Learned, always make recovery discs when you get a new laptop. (Although it woulda been nice if I coulda started out on a fresh install of windows instead all of the OEM bloat but whatever)

Thanks for your help

Regards,
kmstrube81