New HP DV6 - NO Win7 Disk blues... I miss DOS 3.03....HELP!!!

One month old HP DV6-6163cl.

Laptop stopped working. Seems that hard drive is bad, but did my duty and used win7 recover setup to backup my system. And, of course, burned a recover boot cd. Laptop under warranty for almost 2 more years. Called HP support.
Ran HD tests as they wanted and reported error codes. They confirmed HD is bad. So far so good....

I got a cool Momentus XT SATA HD which I can use while waiting for a new HD, so I said I would send in the bad HD and they could send me a free replacement HDD under warranty. They said no.
They want me to send in my entire laptop and be without it for weeks.
I said okay but it wouldn't be until I was going on vacation and didn't need the DV6 for awhile. They said okay.... let them know when I was sending in my laptop.

Now, for the even worst part.
Installed the 500Gb Momentus XT and booted with my HP recovery CD. All seemed to go well until it said it could not do the recovery. Found out, you cannot do Win7 recovery onto a HDD smaller than the original HDD.
How do folks install SSDs??? Yup, with Acronis. So downloaded and installed Acronis on my working laptop(this DV7) and looked to convert my Win7 recovery files, on my external backup 2TB USB drive, into tip files. Now, I had no idea WHICH DV6 Win7 files to convert as i had about a dozen of them with varying dates ranging from BEFORE I even got the dang laptop. Went ahead and converted the latest two recovery files.

But, now when I booted into the Acronis disk and chose either of the two recovery files I converted, it won't let me change the partition size for the anything other than the one listed as SYSTEM, which is a small one. There are two more partitions one of which is about 690Gb... larger than my entire new HDD.

So, then I got a Win7.ISO disk and booted with that. Tried installing Win7 but it won't install without a DVD/CD DRiver for the PC??? What???

Then dragged out one of my dusty WinXP disks, figuring to install XP and then run the Win7 installl, but the XP install blue screens with an ACPI.SYS stop screen.... argh.

I don't think I will ever buy any PC ever again that doesn't come with a set of actual setup/OS disks.

Other than maybe order and pay HP($25) for the actual Recovery DVD, what else can I try.

 

What I have done many times with laptops to preserve the original oem windows and recovery partition is to clone the original hard drive with acronis to the new hard drive (using an external sata2usb case) then swapping hard disks and starting recover to get a fresh windows install on the new hard drive.

The other way is to get a windows retail dvd or bootable usb from someone, install a fresh windows install with all drivers/programs (manually) and reactivate windows.

 

lolwut?

HP Pavillion DV6-6XXX series Owners Lounge V2

 

Gave up and bought the HP recovery Win7 disk set for $22 delivered. I hope I can get them to work..... argh.

 

Success... HP supplied discs worked perfectly.

Based on this fiasco I cannot EVER recommend buying a new laptop/PC without spending the $20 for the actual original discs....

 

Say what? Many people here have installed SSDs with just the recovery procedure. This is the first time I've heard of it failing due to hard disk size.

 

If you try to restore a system image to a smaller drive than the original you'll get a message that says something like there are no drives available that can be restored to. As long as the original drive is still working, there is a workaround: before creating the system image go into Computer Management and shrink the partition until it'll fit the new drive. Keep in mind that any restore partition, the small Windows system partition, and any other partitions on the same drive will also be included in the system image and the total size must be smaller than the replacement drive. Once you have restored the image to the new drive you can go back into Computer Management and expand your partition to fill the drive.