[PLUG] Backing up recovery partitions to a USB device, making bootable

[Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com>]

My new Dell 2-in-1 naturally didn't come with any recovery CDs.  What it 
did come with are two partitions at the "end" of the 128 GB SSD.  Both 
are NTFS, one is 450 MB with a label of WINRETOOLS and one is 10.79GB 
with a label of Image.

I want to get these off the SSD and onto a USB drive to free up over 11 
GB of space before I partition the drive yet more and try to squeeze 
another OS onto it (the SSD came with a total of 5 partitions).

The windows system tool for creating a "recovery image" fails. 
Searching for it turns up pages of complaints on MS boards that the tool 
doesn't work on Dell products.  I tried it with two different USB drives 
on different ports on the machine and cannot create a recovery image for 
my computer.

Trying something else, I've copied the 2 partitions to a USB drive with 
GParted, and tried setting first one, then the other, with the 
"bootable" flag.  Unfortunately, when I try to boot with the USB drive, 
I get a "no operating system found" error.

I guess I need to put a bootloader on the USB?  I looked into doing that 
with System Recovery CD but the directions focus on chroot, under the 
assumption that you have a working linux install on the drive you want 
to install GRUB on.  Is it possible to install GRUB on a drive that 
doesn't have linux on it?  How could I do that?

Or am I doing this wrong, is there a better way to make the drive bootable?
--
Greg Helledy
GRA, Incorporated
P:  +1 215-884-7500
F:  +1 215-884-1385
www.gra.aero
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