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I have an Asus Vivoobook x202E which came with Windows 8 preinstalled. I used both Ubuntu and Windows for a short while, but then it all went to crap and I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 13.10 instead, which I have been using exclusively ever since.

Recently I've been wanting Windows for some applications and it occurred to me that I have a copy of the Windows 8 recovery partition on an external HD. I have both a straight up copy of the file system and an IMG-file (which I created myself). It is made up of a root folder named Recovery, which include folders like Boot, EFI, Recovery, System Volume Information and more.

I tried creating a USB-stick with WinUSB from the disk image, but when I try to boot from it it says that "an operating system was not found" (or similar). This seems reasonable since there shouldn't be an entire copy of Windows 8 on there, but I wonder if there is any other way to to install Windows 8 from the copy of the recovery partition?

So, is there a way of installing Windows 8 from an external copy of the original recovery partition, without Windows 8 installed on the computer?

Journeyman Geek
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Haxxel
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  • This is theoretically possible, buy likely difficult. You'd need to restore the files to a partition, and then get the Windows 8 bootloader back into place, and point it to your recovery partition. It's also possible the recovery partition will then fail, as it's expecting to be at the front of the disk, and will likely just lay an image to the disk, meaning it'll clobber anything it finds in its way . . . – ernie Mar 28 '14 at 23:20

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