Recovering Windows After Replacing Hard Drive on HP Pavilion dv6-7138us

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

See if you can convert the disk from MBR to GPT by watching the video at the link below...the author used W10 as an example but it should work the same for W7 too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f81qKAJUdKc

[daerhaegor_01]

That works, but the error code persist during installation.  I also converted it to MBR using a similar command but had no effect either.

I honestly have no idea what to do at this point.  Is there any way to get a copy of installation CD/DVDs from HP or Microsoft?  I feel like that might be the only option at this point.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

This is absolutely mind-boggling.

I hope the SSD you bought is compatible with your notebook.

Normally, you can clean install W7 on almost anything.

But to answer your question...HP no longer sells recovery media for your notebook's model series, but you can still order a set from this non-HP vendor at the link below...

http://www.computersurgeons.com/p-21641-recovery-kit-692847-001-for-hp-pavilion-entertainment-pc-not...

Remember what I wrote about the factory recovery media possibly not working on a smaller hard drive than the one that originally came with your PC.

When I look at the service manual, the smallest HDD offered in that model series was 320 GB.

So, in order for the factory recovery disks to have a chance of working, the SSD you bought has to be at least that large in capacity, and preferably the size of the original HDD, which was 640 GB.

[daerhaegor_01]

Thank you for the link, Paul.  I think I will not go that route because my SSD is 500GB and the previous HDD was 640GB.

At the very least, I think there may be a slight incompatibility because my SSD is SATA III and the storage protocol is SATA II (at least as far as I can tell from the manual).  I didn't mention this at the onset because I didn't want to confuse the issue but I did actually clone the HDD when my initial attempt to recover the OS failed.  The clone worked, but it would relapse into slugishness and had a write speed of about 4 MB/s.  So I don't think it's incompatible, just not ideal.

Paul, I really appreciate all of your help in trying to solve this.  Regretably I think I need to let upgrading to an SSD on this machine go.  But thank you so much for trying to help me.  Best wishes to you, sir.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Sorry that I wasn't able to help you get your notebook up and running on the SSD.

Save it for another PC you have/get.

Personally, I don't think the drive controller speed is the problem.  But i have no idea what the problem could be.

I have SATA III drives in 4 of my notebook and desktop PC's that have SATA II controllers.  One relic even has a SATA I controller, and the SSD works fine, just not quick.  But it runs circles around the SATA I hdd it used to have.

I wish you all the best for a Happy New Year!

[daerhaegor_01 · Accepted solution]

Paul, exciting news!  I finally managed to get it to work.  I had just about given up but kept reading some other forum posts and decided to give one more thing a go.

This is what ended up working:

1. I found this answer to a post about upgrading a laptop with an SSD by Erico.  I read through it and found two parts that helped solify an idea in my mind.  The first were the steps (which I had seen elsewhere and tried before but there was one new addition) of prepping the drive in DISKPART.  I inserted a (supposedly) non-working ISO DVD into the laptop's drive to gain access to cmd prompt.  Within there, I did the following:
   1. > diskpart
   2. > select disk 0 (the only disk, as this laptop has only one slot)
   3. > clean
   4. > convert gpt
   5. > create partition primary
   6. > assign letter=Z
   7. > exit
2. The second part that I found useful was this information: "Since 2012, notebooks have been delivered with UEFI BIOS and GPT partitioned disks rather than the legacy BIOS and MBR partition style.  That means that the Windows installer you are using must also be in UEFI GPT format."  This made sense, given the previous errors I had received about the drive having an MBR table.  Erico pointed to using Rufus, a third-party USB creation tool, to format the installation ISO appropriately.  Now, before we had begun to talk, I had used Refus, but it had proven unsuccessfully.  I think however this was more due to using a bad USB stick.  I changed out the USB stick (to one I knew worked well), downloaded Rufus, and ran it with the following settings:
   1.  
   2. Something that was also different this time around is that I selected FAT32 as the file system rather than NTSC.  Not sure if that had any positive effect but it seemed to work with it.  I'm not willing to test it again though haha.
3. The USB installer created and the hard drive prepped, I plugged it into the laptop and booted up.  The installer started fine as usual.  The only hickup I ran into was on the partition screen.  Disk 0 was displayed as unallocated space and the "Next" button was not greyed out.  However, when I clicked next, the installer would not allow me to proceed.  It threw an error message saying I was not able to use it (I cannot remember the specifics, unfortunately).  I then opened the drive option pull down menu and chose "Format."  Suprisingly, the process completed without throwing an error (something that had never happened to me before).  But it would still not allow me to proceed, so I clicked "Delete" in the drive options.  I was then able to move past the partition screen.
4. I then came to the now infamous installer screen.  It proceeded through "Copying Windows files..." to "Expanding Windows files...", where it had failed so many times before.  In previous attempts it would hold on 0% for about thirty seconds; this time it only stayed there for about five.  It then changed to 1%, then 2% (where I thought it would surely fail) but then kept going to 3 then 4 then 5 and before I knew it it had went past 10%.  Installation then completed without any issues.

I can only guess that perhaps when the ISO's were burned to the disks they weren't formatted correctly OR there was an issue with the laptops optical drive (something I never considered).  It could have also been that the blank DVD's I was using were scratched or otherwise damaged, which prevented both the installation DVD's and recovery disks to fail.

Regardless, I now have a clean and functional copy of Windows 7 64-bit installed on my new SSD laptop.  I will need to install some drivers it looks like but otherwise it is operational.  I tested the write speed too and it is hovering around ~100MB/s, much improved from the previous 4MB/s.

Thank you again Paul for all of your help on this journey.  I'm sure we're both glad it has come to a conclusion, haha!  Happy New Year!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

That is great news!

I'm glad you got W7 to install.

You will need the AMD chipset driver, which HP does not include on the support page.

Select the W10/W7 64 bit file from the link below, install and restart the PC.

AMD Chipset Drivers

https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-8-series-chipsets/890fx