New HP dv6 laptop and Knoppix

[Michael Nolin]

  Lots of lessons learned. 

  I ended up pulling out a SATA USB 3.5 hard drive enclosure, booting Knoppix 6.01. Several 'fdisk -l'  and 'dd if=/dev/baddisk of=/dev/gooddisk' I was able to copy partition information, a working boot sector, and the HP recovery partition. The first whole disk copy was not successful as it stopped on the bad OS sector, a second attempt to copy the 2nd largest recovery sector worked. I was able to run the recovery program which was essentially an entire reinstall of the OS. Rebooting windows after configuration confirmed a correctly installed and booting OS. 

I must have spent at least 6 hours on the phone and rebuilding hard drives. My recovery CD should be here in 2 more days. I was lucky to have Knoppix Hacks, knoppix CD USB hard drive enclosure. ready to go, and previous experience upgrading dual-boot laptops. I couldn't recommend HP to anyone, outside of this group who had time to burn rebuilding a laptop.

Mike

"nailed to the perch" .. deceased, expired, no more"