Safe way to move HP Recovery partition (drive D:)?

[Fx Fuji]

I'm repartitioning the drive in my TX1320 to accommodate a dual-boot configuration. The Vista Home Premium partition (drive C:) has been shrunk to 65 GiB. There is a bunch of unallocated space (for the 'other' OS), and then the HP Recovery partition (drive D:) is at the end of the hard drive, taking up about 8~9 GiB.

What I'd like to do is move the HP Recovery partition so that it starts right after the Vista partition. I've tried several different utilities to copy over the partition, but the MD5 signatures of the original and the copied partitions are different, so I'm not sure if I got a good copy or not.

Does anyone know of a safe way to move the HP Recovery Partition? For that matter, is it save to move it? I can't imagine that the software 'expects' it to be at the end of the drive, but anything is possible, I guess.

Felix

[Fx Fuji]

OK, I managed to move it and the MD5 checksums match, so it looks like the copy should be clean. I'll backup the original partition to another drive just in case, before I clobber it.

Oh, how did I do it? I used a Linux LiveCD (PartedMagic, though any would do) and used the 'dd' command from the terminal (console) window to copy over the partition:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sda3

It worked like a charm! :)

Now, if I can get someone to answer whether it's safe to move it or not.... maybe I should check over at the Linux forum.

Felix