Hello All,

I am hoping someone can help me out, and I have very little knowledge about computers.

I purchased an HP Laptop awhile back, and it came with WIndows 8.0 installed, and was upgraded to Windows 8.1 when it became available.    When I bought the HP Laptop, the built in hard drive had a partition which is a 'Recovery' partition.

I recently got a SMART notice that my HDD was failing.   I was basically very limited in what I could do.  I tried to clone the hard drive, but it wouldn't work.  I was able to 'copy' the Recovery drive to another HDD, which I have placed in one of those little hard drive cases that you can attach to a computer via a USB port.

I have another computer running Windows 8.1, and was wanting to attach the recovery drive via the USB port, and somehow create a bootable USB drive, so I could use the bootable USB drive to get the computer started again (I have a new hard drive in it).

In my searching, I see how to create a bootable USB drive, but all the ones I have looked at (and when I tried it), are creating vs the internal hard drive and don't have an obvious option to create from the attached by USB hard drive with the recovery partition.

Let me know if you can help.

Kevin

In order to create a bootable USB flash drive, you will need to create an ISO file first. For directions on how to do this and create the flash drive, please see Windows USB/DVD Download Tool.

Hello,

Thanks for responding.

My issues is how to create the ISO file from an 'external hard drive', that only has the recovery partition from a crashed hard drive. 

I can figure out how to create the bootable USB from my 'internal' hard drive, but that will be only licensed to that PC.  It also happens to be windows 8.1, and the laptop with the crashed hard drive came with windows 8.0 factory installed

I want to create the bootable USB that I was able to recover from my laptop which had the hard drive go bad.   I didn't get a 'product key' for this copy of Windows 8 since it came already installed on the laptop.  I thought the recovery partition from that laptop could be used to create a new Windows 8 operating system to be installed on the same laptop - but with a new hard drive.  

I seem to be missing 'where' I select what drive to create the bootable USB from, it just seems to default to the internal hard drive... not allowing me to boot from my attached recovery drive from the laptop.

Kevin