I was supose to help a friend with a messed up install on her HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC. A clean install without the HP-ware was orderd and sure enough, that isn't a problem I'll fix that up in a jiffie... Famous last words! Now 36 hours later I gave up. There's NO WAY that computer ever will install with the drivers HP offers on their site for this machine. So, I thought, I will use the bloddy recovery-partition then and sit down afterwards an uninstall all the bloatware. Right? Wrong, so so wrong! Unknown to me they (HP) have hidden part of their recovery program in the 100MB system partition (actually I think it was 200...). And when I do a whipe I usually just kill the partitons (leaving the recovery one intact ofcourse) and do a clean reinstall from USB. So, system restore do not work any more! Reinstalling the "HP Recovery Manager" result in "Missing HardDisk.dll" and fails. What to do now? I don't really want to buy the recovery media from HP. It's not even my machine and geting stuck with a problem like this is unfair to the cusomer (my own opinion) and a real hassle to get around. So? Any suggestions? Parhaps there is some hidden knowlige of how to get hold of the recovery disks, or a secret way to extract the info from the recovery partiton... Any help woud be greatly aprechiated. /Rab.
well if i was the customer i'd be ticked off that you started something you don't know how to do... i work on PCs too, and before you ever wipe anything, you should make a full backup of the hard drive [all partitions] to an external device in the event something like what you are experiencing happens. aside from that, you should take a look at the recovery partition using a windows 7 pe disc and find the drivers that are bundled with the recovery.wim--they will be somewhere among the folder structure most of the time [if an HP usually in a folder labeled "HP"]. you may even have to copy the recovery.wim to an external device, then use the waik on another machine and mount the wim and look in it for the proper drivers. as far as the 200mb system partition that you deleted, there was nothing on there but the bootloader and a winpe.wim that helps load into recovery. you should still be able to find all you need in the recovery partition if you do like i suggested above.
Just not to make any missasumptions, she's no customer (I'm just a happy amature) just a friend. And I'll most definetly will try that method. Thank you for that advise. I'll be back with the result... /Rab.
I'll do one better. The exact modell is HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC ProduktNo: "VJ693EA#UUW" And it is W7 x64 (HomePro)
Do you know what hardware that is not recognised ? is it vital ? It may just be a HP thing,have a similar issue with an Abit board. Windows works perfectly but it does not recognise a certain bit of hardware. i know abit are old hat now but it may be similar. What does it say in the "Device Manger" once a fresh install is done ?
One thing i do when I am asked to install Windows is, I do not use the original HDD but I use one of my spare ones. This allows me to do a test install,or two making sure all is working well. Then I plug their HDD into my machine via SATA to e-SATA and save all their files to disc then install a fresh windows onto the original HDD Bit long winded maybe but it works...
I wouldn't call it long winded; I'd call it experienced-based caution. All of us fall into two basic categories: those of us who have frakked a computer, and those of us who will frakk a computer. The secret is to do it only once. My standard practice is to make an image of the system (maybe two) on an external HDD (maybe two) using Acronis True Image Home or the built-in Windows 7 image creator (maybe both) and then do the OS re-installation. That may be a bit time consuming (maybe 15 minutes to hook up and make a pair of images), but I fall into the group that no longer has to worry about will I ever mess up. The time taken to backup data is never wasted; it's always an extremely good practice.
Ohhh yes, I have messed up on a couple of occasions in the past. I find the hardest thing is trying to explain BIOS flashing and how I will do it but at thier expense. Most choose the loader option. Funny that. I have a feeling this prob might not be too bad and the hardware a HP related issue and not a prolem with the every day running of Windows 7. Probebly wrong having said that.
Last update and reason for failure... A broken harddrive... Simple as that. Wierd result of a broken harddrive to knock out diferent pieces of hardware after install of drivers not actually for the broken hardware, but anyway. After I put a spare harddrive in the inbstall went flawlessly, and an other couple of tries on the original resulted in same old problem. So i put a brand new disk in and it now works just fine with the HP suplied drivers... I have no clue of why, just glad it now works. Thoe the restorepartiton is obviously not any more there... /Rab.
To bad I just did a clean install on a dv6 11 and have all the drivers saved can up load to box if you need them