BIOS on DV7t 4100

[Engineer321]

I have a Hp DV7t, 4100 series, product WW181AV  Notebook. I currently have (2) 1Tb drives installed in it. The OS drive  is now failing, bad blocks. I need to make a disk image of the failing drive for recovery before I loose more data. I want to install a 2Tb drive in the 2nd bay, and create the image on that. Then I will install the Image on a VM from there. Would anyone know if the BIOS will support the 2Tb drive in the 2nd drive bay? I went into the Bios and I cant tell from the available setings.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Yes the BIOS will not limit the size of a SATA hard drive. Also you will not have a problem with MBR vs. GPT file systems as long as the drive is not over 2 TB. 

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askcore/2010/02/18/understanding-the-2-tb-limit-in-windows-stora...

If the current OS is already showing bad blocks it is not very likely you can make a good disk image. I would also do a more garden variety backup of just the important data. 

[Engineer321]

Thank you for the quick reply.

I have a recent Windows Disk image, as well as many backups on another 1Tb drive. I will delete the oldest backup from there and do another file backup only of my important files. I planned on using ddrescue from a Linux Live USB to create the image. I am new to this, but that approach appears to be a decent alternative to writing zeros for my bad blocks.

My biggest issue is the efs security was turned on without me realizing what it was, and an update caused me to loose the keys for the files. A 3rd party scan software to recover lost keys wont go beyone the blocks very well. They suggested the image to preserve the file structure from further damage after they analyzed the bad block issue. The plan is to scan the image for other instances of the EFS key that is missing. if I cant recover the keys 80% of my files are usless with encryption enabled.

If you have any other advice, I am certainly open to input.

Thanks again for the reply.