Horribly bad luck!! Need your help Gents

Hello Gentlemen,

I have been an owner of a DV6-6096 for less than a day and I am in great trouble, i would really appreciate your help.

I have been using a 4 year old Pavillion with 2GB RAM and Nvidia 8400M, and the screen had started showing nothing but red and blue pixels recently.

Yesterday i grabbed the last DV-6096 in my City, as all 6000 models are replaced by the 61xx models. It was on Display and it had 280GB of unallocated space!! (out of 1TB)

So i burned the recovery media - 4 dvds- and then installed Paragon Partition manager to fix the unallocated space issue and here where i did a HUGE mistake. As soon as i launched paragon it popped up a message asking me if i want to fix a problem in "an incompatible table size for each volume" including the RECOVERY drive D:

I made an uneducated guess at 5am and hit YES. Now the recovery drive lost its partition name ( D: ) but kept its label RECOVERY and disappeared from my computer; furthermore, the recovery manager cant detect it anymore and says it has been deleted. However, I can still see the 14.5GB recovery partition in the disk manager but it is inaccessible. Even Worse, the recovery disks dont recognize my system for some weird reason, i cant do a factory reset anymore!!

AND, i wasn't able to partition the unallocated 280GB!

So now I am on a laptop that has around 650GB instead of 1TB and a malfunctioning recovery volume and useless recovery disks.

I decided to do a Clean install of Windows 7 by formatting the hard disk. I have already backed up the drivers folder SWSetup and backed up my windows and license keys and burned a bootable Win7.iso

(using this guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/428068-legal-windows-7-download-links-just-like-vista-before.html )

The problem now is: The boot up win7 installation cannot detect my hard drive and keeps asking me to browse for my driver. i tried everything.

the Intel SATA AHCI RAID Controller driver (iaStor.sys) wasn't recognized by the installer. it wants a .info driver.

Inside SWSETUP>Drivers>Chipset>ALL there are many drivers including SATA chipset yet still no devices have been identified by the installer. I have the stock Toshiba 1 TB hard disk. I cannot proceed with the clean install!!

Please help. this is my first decent laptop in 4 years, its really sad.

Anyone tried a clean command prompt format followed by a fresh windows 7 installation? (not using the recovery disks)

 

you have to set the recovery drive as ACTIVE in windows DISK manager.

why don't you delete all partitions(with a windows 7 disk). Restart the computer and use the recovery disk to restore it back to factory.

if it still doesn't work, you can buy an external case for 2.5" SATA disk and use another computer to format the drive.

 

tried it didn't work. even if i set it as active the recovery manager will load on boot up but it will deactivate the recovery options (factory defaults and Minimum system image, they are greyed out). it thinks the recovery partition is empty or something.

When booting up with recovery disks they simply say that they are incompatible with my system.

 

Can you still log on to Windows? the problem is that your hard drive is showing a lot used space right?

 

I can still log on to windows normally.

I have no problems with the functionality.

I just lost my recovery partition (it is physcially still there but theres no pointer to it any longer), lost the functionality of my recovery disks, and got 280GB of unalloacted space (defect from store). Only way around that is to format and install a fresh copy from a Win 7 bootup which i already have)
Anyone tried it? if yes please let me know how you by passed the request for hard drive drivers by Win 7 bootup.

 

you can format your drive using command prompt from your Windows 7 disc.

 

yes and then what? i have to proceed with installing windows 7 right? Well it will not proceed because, for the million times, it needs those drivers to proceed with the installation.

Thank you for you quick answers ghost305 , let us see what happened with the owners who faced similar issues.

 

problem fixed.

I am using a USB flash to boot up my Win7 installation. I simply plugged it in the USB 2.0 instead of the 3.0 port and setup is no longer asking for drivers, it can see the all the partitions now.

Proceeding with the format.

 

I reinstalled windows 7 to get rid of bloatware and to install on a ssd by using a win7 install disc that I burned. It does work, just copy over the swsetup folder and either use ABR to reactivate windows or just enter the key when you install. Then install your drivers from the swsetup folder. You can repartition all your stuff to fix the unallocated space problem. Doing it this way pretty much makes the recovery partition useless anyway.

You can make your own windows 7 install disc using instructions found here: (I'll add in in a minute)

nvm seems like you got it

 

dwalk1989 thanks. where u from?

 

Oklahoma