I have a (semi)-dead hard drive with an HP recovery partition on it.

My goal is to

1. Buy a new hard drive
2. Copy the recovery partition to a drive ( dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=~/recovery.bak )
3. Make a new partition of 12000 mb with Windows 7
4. Copy back recovery partition to the new drive ( dd if=~/recovery.bak of=/dev/sdb1 )

Then press F11 when the laptop boots. However, this doesn't work. Any idea why?

Edit:
I suspect the F11 doesn't work because the laptop tries to boot the laptop, because my partition is the primary partition of the drive.

Does anyone have any experience dealing with stuff like this?