Hard Drive Failing - Replacement/Recovery Procedure

[boski02760]

The hard drive is failing on my Pavilion 510-p136 desktop.  It hangs frequently with the Disk Utilization pegged at 100% for minutes at a time.  It fails the Short Drive Self-Test with ID RG84R9-8KTA8C-XD4F6K-60QA03.  All indications are that it should be replaced.

It seems easy enough to purchase a new disk, install it as Drive 1, format it, copy everything over from the C: drive, swap the cable and reboot.  However, I'm sure I would lose the EFI System Partition and Recovery Partition.  Is there a better HP-endorsed process to replace the failing hard drive that will create the same partitions on the new disk without the need to backup/restore all my data?  I've viewed a ton of items on these forums and elsewhere, but I can't find a proper procedure documented anywhere.

Thanks for any help!!

[Grzwacz]

Hi,

Data backup is the primary objective.

The error message you see indicates the boot disk drive is failing.

I would copy all data to a external drive now. You might be able to image the current HDD to backup media which can be used to move the image to the new HDD or SSD. The successful completion of this operation depends on the condition of the current HDD.

I use Macrium Reflect free version (Link) to do OS images. You also have to create Macrium USB recovery media so you can copy the Macrium image on external media to the new HDD or SSD. This (Link) may provide some help using Macrium.

Other options include buying HP Recovery media (Link), look at "Order Recovery Media". or installing Windows clean (Link).

These last two options require backing up data.  Both of these options will destroy existing data on the HDD. The first option will move existing data to the new drive if it can be done.

Regards

[toysareforboys]

The best free recovery software is ddrescue. To use it you would copy Ubuntu Live onto a USB stick (with rufus for example), boot the computer off that stick, install ddrescue (and the DDRescue-GUI which makes it 100x easier to use) then run a recovery from your old drive to a new drive (use list disks to triple check which way you are cloning, i.e. sda is old drive -> sdb is new drive or visa versa, TRIPLE CHECK!). Generally the new drive has to be exactly the same size or larger than your old hard drive (i.e. if you have a failed 500GB hard drive and are trying to recover to 480GB SSD for example, the recovery will fail). After you've triple checked the disks to make sure you're cloning the right direction then click settings and choose "fastest" but set retries to unlimited. Let it chew on your old hard drive for a while and once is either says complete or "time since last data read" is more than 1 hour then abort the recovery and you're done!

ddrescue will clone all of your data including the boot sectors and EFI partitions, etc.

If you wanted the ultimate performance out of your new hard drive and you're not using your pci-express slot (with a graphics card for example, pictures I found of your computer only show one card slot) then you could get a NVMe hard drive and an inexpensive pci-e to nvme adapter such as $12US from Amazon "GLOTRENDS M.2 PCIE NVME Adapter Card PCIE GEN3 Full Speed for PC Desktop PA09".

-Jamie M.

[boski02760]

Thanks, I was thinking along those same lines.  I agree, the #1 objective is to preserve the data (while #2 is making sure my Windows installation and bootability remains intact).  I'm hoping that I may luck out and be able to add a new replacement disk as Drive 1 and clone Drive 0, then replace Drive 0 with Drive 1 and be on my way.  I believe Seagate drives come with cloning software..?  Not sure.  While I have many years of experience in the industry, I've been lucky enough to never have had a hard drive failure in some 26 years of owning a home PC.  It was a good run!  lol!

[toysareforboys · Accepted solution]

If your computer boots into Windows currently it will boot into Windows on the new drive after you clone it (if using the right cloning software). DO NOT boot the computer with both drives plugged in after the cloning as there will be a disk signature collision and Windows will offline one of the drives and switch your windows drive letter to D drive which will break all kinds of things.

99% of cloning software will crash if it hits bad sectors (read errors) on the source drive.

If you want to try more simple cloning software (that's 10x better than the seagate software) try clonezilla (Live bootable USB image). Not sure how it'll cope with the bad drive but it's worth a try. If it fails the ONLY option that will work is ddrescue as it intelligently handles bad sectors. Clonezilla also requires a hard drive larger than the original.

If you need more help getting ddrescue up and running just let me know.

-Jamie M.

[boski02760]

Jamie, thanks so much, I did exactly as you recommended and our PC is now running on the new drive cloned with ddrescue!!  As a side note, I kind of liked playing with Ubuntu and am probably going to make this a dual boot device so I can go back and forth (this will really help testing software for work).  Thanks again, I REALLY appreciate the advice!!!