Lost Recovery Disks? No problem!

After about two days of monkeying with my laptop I've figured out how to create a rough recovery system for my laptop.
Major issue I had was that I got my laptop back from repair and lo, it did not have the option to recover from the hidden partition, so after calls to ASUS and having the base run-around about re-ordering install disks I started looking at what was actually on that recovery partition.

It turns out that this is damned easy, provided you are desperate to not have to ship your computer back to ASUS.

First off, the tools:

GParted
bootsect.exe
Windows 7 USB/DVD
Windows 7 ISO

I'll try to remember to link the tools when I reference them.

required supplies:
the above software
DVD-R or CD-R and burning software
a drive, (flash, external HDD, whatever, so long as it is at least 10GB)
if your laptop isn't behaving you will need a second computer with an internet connection, preferably high speed.

First download the most recent version of the Gparted LiveCD. This is usually listed at the top of the linked list. Second, burn the .iso to a disc.

***Important***
This is a "disc image" meaning that you do not burn the file itself. Instead, there will be an option in nearly all burning apps which says something to the effect of "Write disc from .iso".

Once burned insert the Gparted CD in the drive and restart. When the Asus symbol comes up, immediately press F2 to enter the BIOS. In the BIOS, navigate to the page where the boot order is specified and move the CD drive to the top, then save, exit and reboot (F10).
On more recent ASUS notebooks you can press the escape key to bring up a boot menu to choose where the laptop will boot from. Once the menu comes up, select the CD/DVD drive as the drive to boot from.
The Gparted CD should boot. Select the automatic option and wait for the CD to load. Answer the simple question along the way (English? U.S. keyboard?). The options in brackets [] are the default options, just keep mashing enter if you have doubt about what to choose. The GUI (graphical user interface) should eventually appear. If it does not (some graphics cards give the program issues), select the option to force the VESA driver.

You should now be looking at a illustration of all partitions on your main hard drive. The first one is the RECOVERY partition and it will likely be anywhere from 2GB all the way up to a whopping 16GB. Right click this partition and select copy. On the upper right corner of the program, click the button with the symbol of a disk and /dev/XXX on it and scroll to and select the disk you wish to store the recovery partition on. This disk you are transferring on to needs to have 4GB more than the recovery partition. Go ahead and hit paste when it is selected, then click apply changes.
Paste the RECOVERY partition into the unallocated space. If you would like, flag this partition as hidden so it cannot be used as regular storage.
Now boot back into the BIOS and restore the boot order to the original, if you changed it.

So now you have a nice copy of your recovery partition from your hard drive. Now for some stuff that will take some time.
You will need a clean install image of Windows 7 of whatever flavor you want, it can be downloaded here.
You will also need the Windows USB/ISO tool to write the image to your flash drive.
So why not go have some coffee and take a break while you wait on the install image to download 3GB takes awhile for some people?




Welcome back!
Now, copy the files from the recovery partition somewhere safe, drop em on a DVD, whatever, but DON’T LOSE THEM.
Run the Windows USB/ISO tool and create a bootable USB installer, there are directions on the website you download the tool from if you have any questions on how to use it.
Once you have a USB install of Win 7 on your flash drive, merge the contents of your RECOVERY partition with the install files on there, just click and drag. Anything that has the same names needs to be replaced, so 'yes to all' is a good option.

Now, last step and you can be done, download bootsect.exe and put it somewhere on your hard drive you can navigate to (I suggest C: as I’m lazy). Open up the command prompt (press the windows key and R, then type ‘cmd’ and press enter).
Navigate to wherever you have dropped off bootsect.exe
Type ‘bootsect /nt60 X:’
Where X is the drive letter of your flash drive, this will make it bootable.

Plug it into your laptop and it will restore your entire system back to factory state!

-Note: doing things this way seems to make it a bit slow on the uptake on applying your product code, go ahead and click cancel if it prompts you about it. It will take an update or two and a reboot to work that out of its system, but once it does, go ahead and activate.

-Also the springboard for doing this was this thread by Nrbelex