Hard drive failure 301

[jcinsdca]

My laptop went from working one day to getting the 305 message. I had tried numerous recovery measures on this situation , such as F4, however it fails. I have an external hard drive (1 TB ), that I would like to transfer all my files, howver am concerned I may not be able to get to the OS ( Vista ), in order to do that.

Any advise in the proper procedure to do this is greatly appreciated. I understand that I will need to replace the hard drive any way, but want to save all photos and files before losing everything.

I do have  1 TB of cloud storage where many important photos and files are stored, but would like to do this "save" anyway for the comfort of having a copy.

[Huffer]

Stop trying to access the operating system. Since it is a dv7 it can hold two hard drives. My advice is to buy a new hard drive and install Windows on it...please Windows 7 not Vista unless you have a Vista recovery disk and need to do this as inexpensively as possible. Then move the old hard drive into the second bay and you can scavenge files from it. You may even be able to leave it in place but generally not advised to have a bad hard drive in the system. 

I cannot recall if the dv7-2000 came from the factory with a second hard drive caddy/connector but you can pick one up from newmodeus.com if not:

https://www.newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_5&products_id=222&zenid=3413...

This is a dv7-3000 but I believe the process on yours is very similar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb-zgFKVAZA

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