# Using DD to restore Windows Recovery Partition



## balanga (Mar 6, 2016)

I have an ISO of a Windows Recovery Partition and would like to install this onto a hard disk.

Any pointers on how to do this?

I'm guessing

`dd if=/somepath/windowsrecovery.iso of=/dev/ada0p1`

or somesuch... But before that I would need to create the partition and make it bootable using 

`gpart`

If there is a tutorial on doing this I'd like to read it.

I'll try following this and see how close I get

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

but I don't know if FreeBSD is able to create a bootable Windows disk.


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## wblock@ (Mar 6, 2016)

The hard disk will need some sort of bootcode that can boot NTFS from GPT.  Grub can do that, probably others but I have not tried.  As far as copying the binary, giving dd(1) a buffer will speed things up a lot:
`dd if=/somepath/windowsrecovery.iso of=/dev/ada0p1 bs=128k`

I can't recall a time when a Windows recovery partition ever actually recovered Windows for me, though.


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