Satellite A660 What partitions to copy in creating bootable clone?

Question

I have a Toshiba Satellite A660 running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. From surfing forum threads, it seems that Toshiba has a unique way of partitioning up the HDD for a notebook. From Disk Management and PowerQuest Partition Table Editor, my 640GB HDD has 4 partitions:
Partition 1: Windows RE, 1.46 GB
* "Active", likely contains boot info
* Not large enough to contain Windows 7 image
* Actual Windows 7 image likely in partition 3 or 4
Partition 2: 559.5 GB NTFS C-drive
Partition 3: 22.37 GB Hidden Installed File Systems
Partition 4: 12.83 GB Hidden Installed File Systems
The closest that I could find to a description of partitions 1,3,4 is http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/619983-solved-mystery-partition-toshiba-notebook.html for a VISTA system in 2007. Partition 1 is likely for booting. Partitions 3 and 4 contain some sort of recovery files for alternate languages.
Though I will ask Tech Support about the partitions, I don't expect them to know. Even if they do, it is on the phone, which leaves me no documentation.
1) I was wondering if anyone can confirm (or point to online documentation that confirms) the above suspicions of the purposes and contents of the partitions?
2) Furthermore, how can I tell which of partition 3 and 4 contain the recovery files for the language of the installed Windows 7, which is English?
3) Finally, I intend to clone all partitions except the one containing the unused language recovery files. This will be my first crack at cloning or handling partitions in anyway (never done an image). Is this plan sane?
The intent is for the cloned HDD to be a complete bootable drop-in replacement for the source HDD in its entirety. I will be using Norton Ghost. At this point, I am not interested in creating recoverable images, though I might explore that down the road.

Answer 1

I'm glad you posted. The first thing I did in response was to figure out how to make recovery discs, then make them.
I was going to clone all partitions because I wasn't absolutely sure about the purposes of them all. The thread that I linked to in my original post was speculative, and also referred to a different machine & OS. However, if you're absolutely certain that partitions 3 & 4 are for recovery, then it does raise the question of why clone them.
I think there still are reasons, though not everyone would think them worthwhile. It's for redundancy and convenience. From surfing around, Toshiba designs laptops so that you can recover to a factory image by holding down 0 when booting up. Kind of handy if I'm not at home (or in my home city) or can't conveniently access my recovery discs -- maybe I lose them! I'm not about to test that disc-less recovery on my laptop, but even if that feature *wasn't* present, it's nice to know that I don't have to worry about losing my recovery discs. The partitions don't take up much of the HDD, and the HDD is way, way bigger than I will ever need.
However, in order to clone all partitions, I will have to shrink the C-drive partition, which means the locations of the recovery partitions will shift. I'm not sure if this will break the disc-less recovery function.
As well, I would like the cloning software to resize the C-drive partition in the cloning process so that the partition size doesn't have to be resized in the source drive. According to anecdotes, both Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image can do this, and create a bootable target HDD. I was wondering if anyone can suggest reasons to prefer one over the other.
Ghost's *trial* version is handicapped and cannot do what is required, though they have a refund period for a purchased, fully-functional version. I will be looking into Acronis True Image. As for ease of use, would anyone who has tried both be able to comment?
Message was edited by: Bookworm123