HP Pavilion dv7-4069wm hard drive question

[bluto]

So someone gave me their dv7-4069wm pavilion to look at. I quickly discovered it was dead as in will not POST. No beeps, no hard drive light, or video on the screen. I reseated the RAM, but yeah still no. Then I was told that it has an extended warranty from the friendly folks at wally world.

Why did you not mention this before? I was about to take it apart and void that extended warranty. So my friend leaves with instructions to inquire about his extended warranty. Two days later he calls back and says that they are sending him a box... The only caveat is that his data would probably be lost and could I please pull some files off first? No problem...

But yes there is... This beast has dual 320GB drives and is advertised as having 640GB of drive space. So I am assuming that they are striped...

TLDR: On a laptop with dual drives that are potentially striped, will hooking one drive up to an XP box frag the fragile raid0 bs that is going on there? Could I hook up both drives and see the files (maybe not since it is probably some hardware raid bios running the show on the lappy)? Would I have to use Windows 7 to do this since it is a Win7 formatted raid set? Is this guy SOL apart from sending it in sans the drives?

[Uranium-235]

Re: HP Pavilion dv7-4069wm hard drive question

sounds likes bad nvidia chip

there is some recovery software out there that can recover raid 0'd drives

If I were to guess MAYBE since that is an Nvidia chipset, you *might* be able to hook them up to an nvidia chipset motherboard with raid enabled, boot to your main OS and see if the onboard nvidia raid software will be able to read the stripe info and you can just copy off them. shot in the dark, off the top of my head

[gerg]

Re: HP Pavilion dv7-4069wm hard drive question

Is this a shot? Putting one disk in a computer and boot off of a live cd would that destroy the data if it was a raid? What if they are not striped not like i think they shouldn't but what if?

[bluto]

Re: HP Pavilion dv7-4069wm hard drive question

Anybody? I would think that a Live CD would be safer than booting into windows. Ideally linux would be able to see the partition table (if there was one) in a non destructive way. Where in Windows it would probably go like this: "Herp-a-derp...Hey new drive, let me initialize that for you..hur!"

[shovenose]

Re: HP Pavilion dv7-4069wm hard drive question

Anybody? I would think that a Live CD would be safer than booting into windows. Ideally linux would be able to see the partition table (if there was one) in a non destructive way. Where in Windows it would probably go like this: "Herp-a-derp...Hey new drive, let me initialize that for you..hur!"

it would not destroy the data to boot off an ubuntu (or similar) linux live cd. however if you install it thats another story...

[bluto]

Re: HP Pavilion dv7-4069wm hard drive question

Well I finally broke down and cracked the case on my main computer so I could slave the SATA drives from the laptop. I decided to boot up with an old version of knoppix for safety.

So the first drive that I pulled was seemingly blank. No partition table. I looked at it raw and saw just a few bits of data at the beginning with strings like "No Operating System Installed"...

The second drive did have a partition table. Four partitions in fact: 'SYSTEM', 'OS', 'RECOVERY' and 'HP_TOOLS'. All NTFS except the latter. So now I decide to boot into Win7 with my main drive and the laptop drive as a slave.

All appears well. I can see all the partitions and look the files. Well all except for the individual 'User' directories. F'in Windows security says that I don't have permission and would I like to give myself permanent permission? It sounds dangerous like it is modifying permissions. Would this screw things up if I later tried to run this drive back in the laptop without wiping and re-installing?

What is the easiest way to take an image of the whole drive so I can just restore it back when the laptop is returned from being repaired?