I'm assisting a friend with a desktop Pavilion that may need to be restored. It's an Intel Core2Duo running Vista. The recovery partition is assigned a drive letter. I've owned lots of HP Pavilions and don't recall the recovery partitions having been assigned drive letters. They exist without a letter being assigned.
Is the D: drive assignment the factory standard? If the letter assignment is removed in partition manager (to reduce confusion by the user) will recovery still work?
Second question: as part of the restore process I'm contemplating replacing disk0 with an SSD. I'd do a factory reset, shrink the partition, copy the clean image (including the recovery partition) onto a 120GB SSD, then replace the HD with the new SSD.
The computer already has a second HD that is more than adequate for data storage. I'll use properties>location to redirect personal storage folders to that secondary drive. That being the case, a 120GB SSD is more than sufficient.
With that approach, will a subsequent recovery to the SSD still work, if required? I'll keep the original 300GB HD around, for safekeeping.
Thanks for your expertise.