Wierd recovery attempt

[ljtechservices]

Elderly customer brought in an older HP dv6 that her daughter gave her.
Daughter said it needed a hard drive.
They wanted to know what I could do.

I ran the built in diags. Everything was okay except for the disk. It failed the built in disk diag.

Checked with HP to see if they had recovery CD's available but they didn't.
I could order them 3rd party but before that I took the following chance.

I took the disk and hooked it up to another PC and it came up. so I took an acronis image of it.
Hoping to get lucky I restored the image to another drive but it failed because a portion of the OS record was corrupt according to Acronis.
So I took a chance and just restored the MBR and the recovery partition.
Popped the disk into the laptop and it started running the system recovery.

I tried this before but evidently I did it right this time.

looking forward to putting the original disk in the bench PC to figure out what is wrong with it.

[PCX]

So, I am kinda confused as to what you are trying to do. Are you trying to clone the partitions over to a new hard drive and restore the OS onto the new hard drive using the recovery partition? Or are you trying to restore the OS to the bad hard drive? There is no sense in trying to repair the old hard drive, so I am assuming that you are trying to do the former. The most successful cloning program that I have come across is Gddrescue. It will skip over errors and retry them as many times as you like. Other cloning tools will stop at the first error and just give up.

[ljtechservices]

Originally Posted by PCX

So, I am kinda confused as to what you are trying to do. Are you trying to clone the partitions over to a new hard drive and restore the OS onto the new hard drive using the recovery partition?

Yeah. the old harddrive wouldn't even recognize in the laptop. But it would show up when slaved in another computer (SATA - USB connector)

I was able to image it with acronis. but when trying to restore, the OS partition wouldn't restore for some reason.
Trying to avoid ordering a recovery disk set, i just tried restoring the MBR and the recovery partition. I was shocked that it worked.

Acronis now will skip errors and continue but restoring doesn't work sometimes. However I was able to pull the user profile from the tib file.

[PCX]

Originally Posted by ljtechservices

Yeah. the old harddrive wouldn't even recognize in the laptop. But it would show up when slaved in another computer (SATA - USB connector)

I was able to image it with acronis. but when trying to restore, the OS partition wouldn't restore for some reason.
Trying to avoid ordering a recovery disk set, i just tried restoring the MBR and the recovery partition. I was shocked that it worked.

Acronis now will skip errors and continue but restoring doesn't work sometimes. However I was able to pull the user profile from the tib file.

Fabs also seems to work well on failing hard drives as long as the file system is not crapped up too bad.

[AlaDes]

I usually use the partition editor included in parted magic's utilities. As long as it's just the recovery partition you are after, all you have to do is copy the recovery partition from the old HD over to the new one and set the "boot" flag on it. This of course won't work on all computers but I know it will work on most HPs. Also, the partition must not have any errors on it.