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    New HDD, Now freeze @ F11 prompt

    Discussion in 'HP Business Class Notebooks' started by Valuepack, Feb 23, 2011.

  1. Valuepack

    Valuepack Newbie

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    Hi,
    Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

    Recently my NW9440 running XP crashed. Worked fine one day, BSOD on boot the next. I went thru the F11 recovery and got her back up and running, but I found some bad sectors in the HDD and figured that was the cause.
    I ordered a new HDD, pulled out the old, and used acronis to clone the drive keeping the recovery partition as close to original size as possible (it rounded to 6.649GB rather than 6.64741GB). I put new drive into laptop and it freezes at the "press f11 for emergency recovery" prompt. I rebooted and pressd f11, recovery boots fine (to my surprise). I tell it to restore to factory settings, and it seems to go thru the entire process fine. However, when I reboot it freezes at the same spot.

    I'd try the recovery CD's but I have apparently misplaced them and it won't let me burn another set.

    Any info or search terms would be appreciated.
    Thanks,
    Bob
     
    Valuepack, Feb 23, 2011
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  2. Judicator

    Judicator Judged and found wanting.

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    It sounds like maybe your clone (or original data) is corrupt. I'm afraid you'll have to find an XP install disc and reinstall it using your CoA (or buy a new license for XP, Vista, or Windows 7).
     
    Judicator, Feb 25, 2011
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  3. Valuepack

    Valuepack Newbie

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    Update in case this helps someone out there one day:

    A friend suggested I use a XP cd to boot into recovery console and use fixboot and fixmbr.

    I booted to a win XP cd and it could not find any HDD. I used the hitachi feature tool and set the HDD to SATA 1.5Gb - no change. Searched around and found people recommended changing SATA bios settings. Did that, still same error at F11 prompt, but XP cd could find the C: windows partition and the D: recovery partition now. Tried fixboot, no change. Tried fixmbr & then it froze where the F11 prompt used to be, but there was no F11 prompt.

    Friend suggested clone again >> recovery console >> delete windows partition >> recreate a partition & run recovery.

    I didn't try this exactly, but I ended up using clonezilla & getting read DMA errors, even when the -recovery option was set. So I cloned only the partition table, boot sector and recovery partition. After that, the HP recovery stuck & I was up and running :)D) only to find out that the new HDD has bad sectors already. I'm not sure if that helped cause some of these problems, but I'm hesitant to trust the disk now and I figure ill send it back to get a replacement.

    Bob
     
    Valuepack, Feb 27, 2011
    #3