Tired of Installing Your OS?

[GhastMaster]

Are you saying HP has the OS on one partition and he creates another to store all of his valuable data?

I'm not familiar with how HP computers recover without a disc :( Without the BartPE disk or a similar disc you can't use SelfImage to restore your OS. Unless you have a functioning operating system installed on the system. One problem that would arise is without the original hardware the original OS would probably not recognize the new harddrive and start up, even if it did put the OS on properly. I'm not sure if there is a way to get around that. If you just want to copy the "recovery partition" it would probably be a small image file and would be easy to store.

You can use SelfImage to copy any partition(D in your case) to any other partion(provided the second is big enough). If your brother has a back-up harddrive you can store it on there. Also, you could take the image of his D drive and store it on a cd/dvd/usb flash drive and keep that in case the harddrive fails.

I hope I answered your question. If I misread your post let me know. It sounds like imaging would help in your case though.