OK, I'm about to pull my hair out here...
I used a Windows 7 DVD I had to install a good installation of Windows on the new drive. But it's a different Windows edition than came on the netbook (I have the key for the netbook installation, but have NOT tried any activation - haven't connected it online yet). It does the basic functions fine. I have the HDDRecovery partition on it as a primary (not hidden) partition, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to reboot it into the HDD Recovery mode. I'm guessing it's because I don't have the original MBR...
I have the Windows RE(store) partition saved (thanks to TestDisk) as an image.dd file, but I don't have a clue how to restore it and can't find anything online as to how to do so - at least that I can understand. And I'm not sure if it would be helpful or not...
I can pay $30 or $40 for recovery media, but it would take days to get here, and I'd rather not pay either... I feel so close and yet so far since I have the files right here - but can't get it to work.
The files on the HDDRecovery partition are just over 8GB, and I don't have a thumb drive over 8 GB, so I haven't tried putting it on one and trying to boot from that... I'm ordering one to arrive tomorrow or next day - in case it would help - and hopefully I can make it a bootable media for her to restore from in the future also...
Other angles on this that I haven't thought of yet??