Using Recovery Disks for different sized hard drive....

[Scott_Edwards]

Ok, I'm extremely frustrated with this at this point.  I have an HP a6130n Pavillion.  The manufacturer warranty has expired; however I have an extended warranty with Fry's Electronics.  The hard drive failed and Fry's was only able to replace my 400gb sata drive with a 500gb.  The recovery process freezes at "reformatting the windows partition of your hard disk drive".

I successfully installed Windows 2003 server on this machine to test the drive, components, etc.

I called HP and they confirmed the recovery cd's can only be used with "similar hardware" however it does appear to completely fail/freeze with a different sized hard drive.  Since the manufacturer's warranty has expired, they will only offer assistance with starting the recovery process.  I do not have Vista Home Premium installation media, so at this point, I'm unable to recover my system even after having the recovery disks and replacement hard drive.

HP offered to sell me a 400gb disk which kind of negates my intent of purchasing the extended warranty!  They also offered to sell me a retail copy of Vista, something I SHOULD be entitled to with my OEM license.

Help!  Anyone get around this obstacle?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

[CherylG]

I am not sure of what the problem is exactly,but I am sure of what it is not,imo.I have used Recovery sets to reinstall many times on larger hdd.I have even gone from 160 gb to a 300 gb on one machine here.

The only time I have seen Recovery set stall from different hardware is when a graphics card has been changed,and that was from the original ATI to an Nvidia card.A few other things I have seen cause Recovery to fail is a bad Recovery set, bad ram,bad hdd or even a bad cd/dvd-drive.Since you have installed another OS with success that would seem to rule out the latter 3.

Are you sure the Recovery set is good? Do you have all external peripheals unplugged such as printer,etc? Try formatting the hdd with your other OS cd and then run Recovery.Since you have extended warranty with Fry's,maybe they will try to run the Recovery and try a different hdd.

[Mister_Do]

Hi Scott,

I'm pretty sure you should be able to run a recovery on a drive that is larger than the previous.

Couple of questions:

Did you by chance get impatient during the install process and stop it manually when it seemed like it had froze?

Has the new drive been completely formatted and deleted any existing files or partitions?

You may need to actually wipe out the master boot record, reformat the drive and start over. (here is a link to another forum thread with instruction on how to wipe out the MBR: http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board/message?board.id=OSandSW&thread.id=261)

Did you ever update your BIOS in the past using a non-HP-provided BIOS (for example, a BIOS from the ECS, the MB manufacturer)?

Another possibility is if your discs are scratched or had an error occur on them when you created them.

[Scott_Edwards]

The recovery disks are good, I've used them when the first hard drive failed (while under HP warranty and a disk was mailed to me, matching the 400gb existing failed drive).  It's the exact same machine with only keyboard, mouse, video attached.

Crazy, eh?

[Mister_Do]

That is crazy, and I'm having trouble thinking of what could cause the problem.

[Scott_Edwards]

We're on the same page...I was able to install win2k3 on this machine.  I've removed all partitions, etc. and have used these recovery disks before and they're without scratches, etc.

No bios updates performed aside from the ones that may have been applied as a part of the HP Care center application that came with the desktop.

I've seen other threads whereby the exact same size drive is required; however it seems to be a very poor instance of programming logic if that is the case.

Any other thoughts?

[Scott_Edwards]

oh, I've also attempted the recovery a number of times now...even left it running overnight (12+hrs).  At one point the progress indicator went all the way to 14% of "reformatting the Windows partition of your hard disk drive".

[CherylG]

 Did you try the procedure HERE without success?

Since you have extended warranty with Fry's,maybe they will try to run the Recovery and/or try a different hdd.

Message Edited by CherylG on 12-18-2008 11:46 AM

[rfb9999]

Ditto my a6130 400gb seagate is dying,  replaced with seagate 500 mb and have the same problem.  I make it to 1% of restoring original content and it sits there for hours with disk 2 in the drive and nothing.  unplugged the media drive, reseated memory, checked all connections, no new hardware, only have mouse keyboard and monitor in the system.  ran the smart system short check, drive is there and OK.  After a week and many hours I am about ready to give Dell a call.   HELP!

[Scott_Edwards]

After several hours of working on this, calling HP, calling Frys (retailer where purchased and where extended warranty was purchased), I opted to drop my desktop off to Fry's for them to deal with.  It's been 2 weeks today and they're still working on it.  Extremely frustrating, especially since I've been in IT for 15 years!!!!  The only thing I can think of is that by creating the restore disks from the local machine, it creates a sector level image of the drive and since a new/larger disk has a varied sector/head count it's unable to complete the stringent image restore.  I would ASSume that the recovery disks from HP would be independent of disk variables and create a fixed size recovery partition, fixed operating system partition and allow the remainder of the disk for a data (or fixed recovery and remainder for operating system).