Recovery Disk "Copy File Fail"

[Chromecobra]

Equipment: HP Notebook G56-WM129 

Operating system: Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium edition

Issue:

HDD Crashed, after 1 year and 1 month of use the hard drive up and quit working, the computer doesn't even recognize that it is installed.  Ran the test from BIOS and it confirmed that I have a dead drive.  Unplugged cleaned and repluged connection cable produced the same results. A dead Drive.  Now that we have determined that the drive is dead, inoperable, and unusable we'll move on to the part where my other issue lies.

To replace the HDD I purchased a new 60Gb SSD. (More expensive than a HHD, but is supposed to be awesome on speed)  Went with the 60 Gig because it is costly and I didn't know at the time Windows 7 uses 25 Gb's of space (WOW).

I never created any recovery disc, so I purchased a set from this website using my computers information.  I went ahead and decided to upgrade my ram at this time as well from 3 Gb/s to 8Gb/s.   All the stuff came in and I was excited to say the least.  New toys and all, just like Christmas.  

I put the new SSD and RAM in, boot up the computer the BIOS recognized them both (Great).  I put in the 1st recover disk and proceeded to boot from it.  The program runs and wants me to reformat drive (enter no ends the program). So, I enter yes.  Reformatting goes quickly and moves on to the next phase of copying the files.  Then I get the error:

Pop up box appears with "Reducer" as the title and tells me           

          COPY FILE FAILS

From D:\PRELOAD\BASE.WIM

  TO: C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE.WIM

Press enter to retry.

Pressing enter does absolutely no good (Nothing happens, pressed it a lot).  The disc won't eject and the only thing I can do is hold in the power button until the computer shuts down.  I power the CPU back up, it says it is starting windows and it starts the process all over to Error on the same thing at the same spot. 0% Progress.

After several hours of looking on the boards, I see various people have the same problem, Only once did I see someone have a solution, but it didn't work for me.  It had me follow a link to a destination on HP to download a bootable disk that loaded and showed a picture of 3 circles with no direction on what to do.  I finally saw where I am supposed to eject the disc power it down, start it up with the recovery disc.  But this just leads me back to the issue of FILE COPY FAILs.

I borrowed a copy of Windows 7 (64 bit Home Premium) from a friend and it loaded flawlessly, had me up and running in no time.

But I only have the code that came with my HP and it would not work to activate this windows.  So, I popped the recovery disc back in hoping that all will go well since I have successfully installed Windows.  However, I am back to my original issue and really don't want to have to spend another $200 on an OS when I am supposed to have one and have paid for the Recovery disk from HP.

From my understanding, this is not a Microsoft issue, but a HP issue.

[CherylG]

Usually replacing the hdd with one that is smaller than the original will cause Recovery to fail.A work-around that many use to replace with an SSD is to use Imaging software to make an Image of the hdd to restore to the SSD. The Imaging software must be one that has capabilty to shrink the image to a smaller hdd/partition. That is the one flaw in my favorite Imaging app,Macrium. I think Paragon Backup has the capabity to shrink, and possibly (not free) Acronis True Image. I have also used Disk Management in Windows 7 to shrink the C: partition before Imaging to allow it to be restored to a smaller hdd or partition. Any of these would require a working SATA hdd to install Win 7 on to do the Imaging.

As for the alternate install of Windows 7, you can usually get it activated using your key and the phone activation method. Tips HERE

[Buy_The_Tie]

I just got through this myself. 

I tried to restore through the Application and Driver Recovery CD onto a 60 gig standard HDD and got the same error.

Once I installed a 250GB HDD, the process worked much better.

Thanks for the tip.

[njpatrickca22]

Thanks for your help, this problem was driving me crazy..

[njpatrickca22]

Wil I run into any problems if I use 250gb 5400 rpm instead of 7200 rpm?

[itnorway]

I have read through the forum but I can't find an anwer.

My Pavilion dm3 needs to be recovered so I purchased a full Recovery DVD set from HP.

The error "Copy File Fail" as soon as the copying job is starting on disk 1/2 on first file \PRELOAD\BASE.WIM.

The laptop is original and has not been upgraded or opened in any way.

Can it be the CD that has errors?

Anyone?