HP Pavillion DV4, file backup and restore

[amishra123]

Hi guys, a friend of mine's laptop (HP Pavilian DV4) recently crashed, when powered on it would boot straight into system recover a black cmd box would flash and startup repair would start. It would then just be stuck at this screen(with the bar moving from left to right) if you tried to hit cancel it would say you could not cancel it. So I ran a system diagnostics and got the #1008 imminent failure etc and the SMART error. I then tried to recover the data so i hit f11 and got into the hp system recovery, I went to advanced options and went to file backup and it took over 12 hours to complete. Now on the external HDD there is a folder called MINWINPC and inside it an executable. BUT it is only a shade over 3mb big, can this be right?! Was all the data from the >200GB hadd recovered and compressed down to 3mb!? 

I just need a confirmation so, then my friend can take his laptop to get repaired(I am guessiing they will just swap out the HDD?) with the knowledge that all his data is safe?

Thanks Amishra123

[CherylG]

You should have an executeable file along with multiple files to restore. The hdd may be damaged to the point of the backup app not being able to retrieve files to save. Best option at this point may be to plug the hdd into a usb enclosure  or usb adapter and attach it to another machine via usb port to see if any files can be saved to the hdd of it.