Patent ID: 7650531

Claim:
A method for restoring a hard drive, comprising: collecting, configuration information from an operational hard drive coupled to a device, wherein the device has an associated boot mechanism; and creating a computer-readable recovery media having a bootable recover environment recorded thereon, where in response to failure of the operational hard drive, the recovery environment is operable to: configure a restoration hard drive coupled to the device using the collected configuration information, wherein the Operational hard drive and the restoration hard drive are dynamic disks; boot the device without using the boot mechanism associated with the device; identify dynamic disk data associated with the operational hard drive using the collected configuration information, wherein the identified dynamic disk data is associated with a disk region; write the identified dynamic disk data to the disk region of the restoration hard drive; and set a flag associated with the restoration hard drive to indicate that the restoration hard drive is a dynamic disk, wherein the recovery environment runs on the device without using any hard drive associated with the device.