Replacing hard drive and boot problem in dm3 1112sa

Hi all,

I have recently performed a clean install of Windows 7 on my dm3 and all *seems* to be OK (although I am having a bit of trouble with fan noise).

Anyway, I put the clean install of Win 7 on the original hard drive that shipped with the machine (cant remember the manufacturer at the moment - I think it was seagate). Just so I could do a little comparison, I decided to remove the original 7200rpm 250GB drive and replace it with a Hitachi 5400rpm 250GB drive. Before I put the hitachi drive in I ran diskpart on another Win 7 machine and cleaned the disk (so its completely blank, no partitions, anything).

I had already created the HP recovery DVDs so once the new drive was in, I booted up using the first recovery disk. everything was ok, went through and selected full system recovery. The process then took about 20 minutes and asked for all three disks and by the looks of it was creating the original recovery partitions and placing all the software back on the hard drive with no problems.
The problem came when it had finished transferring all the data and needed to reboot into Windows to continue the process. Basically the machine robooted and immediately came back with the "No Bootable Media" message. I was defintely trying to boot from the hard drive and I changed all the boot options I could find but with no success, the drive just wouldnt boot.

Anyway, I then put back my original drive with the clean Win 7 install on it back inside and it booted up first time no problems.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this is and how it can be solved? What would happen if I were to purchase a new SSD to speed things up and it wouldnt boot or be recognised (as I plan to do at some point).
The only thing I can think of is that the hard drive ID is reported to the BIOS and the BIOS is only set to boot from a particular hard drive ID - i.e. the original one. I really hope something like this is not the case.

Cheers.

 

Did some more playing around - have finally got it to reboot and start loading.

-Tried "Minimized Image Recovery" option from the HP Recovery Disks - did not boot

- Tried "System Recovery" option - did not boot. I tried this one again and again as I used it yesterday on the other drive and I know it worked. While this was on the drive, I booted up the Windows Repair console and did the Startup Repair process and tried again - did not boot.

-Tried the "Factory Reset" option and whoohoo! - that seems to be going OK so far.

So basically I dont know if it was because I ran startup repair or whether its because I chose Factory Reset - but it now seems to install and be bootable.

Does anyone know the difference between the three recovery options because looking at the descriptions, they all seem to do the same thing?

Cheers.

 

From what i gleened from the web (google is your friend ) I found the following quotes from several people (summarized), nothing from HP website (not surprised):

"Minimized Image Recovery"" It wiped my computer clean, then automatically installed the basic drivers and software needed to make everything work in the computer and nothing else”. Note: Most bloatware was removed but not a squeaky clean install.

“System Recovery will format only C partition (i.e. all other partitions will remain intact, including restore partition), where as "Factory Reset" will format the whole disk (all partitions removed)”.

"Factory Reset" is the option that will completely wipe your HDD and return your system back to out of the box condition. This is the option you should use if you are installing to a new HDD and want it to be identical to your original HDD when complete.