Laptop Crash and Burn Recovery

Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

I’m finally getting my HP dx6000 noteback back to where it was. The crash of the C drive was a royal pain.

I did manage to get the crashed drive running using the recovery partition. That wiped out all the installed apps but I was able to reinstall what I needed. In addition, I will now be able to pop that drive back in and get rid of any personal information.

Getting the machine back to 90% functionality took the better part of the day. The first problem I ran into was that the bracket for the new drive had holes that were about a quarter inch further apart than the original drive. In other words, it was not going to fit. I didn’t want to swap the brackets around without checking with tech support so that the warranty would remain valid.

HP tech support said to swap the brackets. That was easy enough. The drive is shipped blank and I had to run the recovery CD that HP sent. That process took a whole lot longer than I expected. The install of Windows wasn’t that bad. However, the installs of the HP software seemed to take quite a bit of time. There were long periods with a totally black screen and a cursor and nothing else.

One thing that was really creepy was the software that loaded in the task bar called FBI GUI Manager. I started thinking “Gee is the FBI loading some type of keylogger, they can’t be stupid enough to blatantly brand it”. It turns out that FBI GUI stands for file based installer graphical user interface. That is software that will create a recovery partition on your new hard drive. The one bit of advice I can give once you kick off the recovery cd is PATIENCE!!. The second bit of advice is PATIENCE…. It took about 5 hours before the process had totally completed. There were a lot of reboots and screens that just sat there with no progress indicators.

Once everything was done, it was time to run windows updates and then start reinstalling all of my applications.