Harddrive fried - having (ALOT of) trouble fixing

I'm in way over my head. Getting very close to just tossing my laptop out of the window and being done with HP and Windows forever.

About a week ago, my HP Pavilion DV7 - which I've had for a little over a year and a half (just long enough to be out of warranty, of course), started to freeze and lag. All of a sudden it froze up completely, applications wouldn't respond nothing would. Tried restarting it and it failed during start up every time. It would take me to start up repair where it would fail to repair whatever the issue was. Repeat ad infinitum.

I tried running some tests in the BIOS, and the SHORT DST test would fail every time. I did some googling and figured out it (might be) the harddrive. Apparently dv7's are notorious for this (can't believe these people are allowed to sell these shoddy pieces of crap). So I got on amazon and ordered a new hard drive (WD scorpio black 7200 rpm 750 gb) and an external usb hard drive case.

After waiting forever for the harddrive to arrive, I finally replaced the defective hard drive. I borrowed a Windows 7 disk (my computer had not come with one and I neglected to make recovery disks ). I've tried booting from the CD with some success, it takes me to the window install process up to the point where its at "EXPANDING WINDOWS FILES" where it always gives me the error "WINDOWS CANNOT INSTALL REQUIRED FILES. MAKE SURE ALL FILES REQUIRED FOR INSTALLATION ARE AVAILABLE AND RESTART THE INSTALLATION".

I'm at my wits end. Every thing I try, the computer stone walls me at every turn. Like I said, I'm very close to just chucking the thing out onto the street and going to Apple from now on. Please help!

I also did try putting the old harddrive into the laptop and going into system recovery. It would try then fail every time. So frustrating.

Apple is no better. Hard drives fail all the time. That is a fact of the computer world.

Contact HP and get a set of system disc for your model. If you have another computer, or access to a friends, download the version of Win 7 your HP is running, Home/Pro/Ultimate, from My digital life. Look at the tutorials on this forum for Clean install factory OEM. You will need to use the license key that is on the COA sticker on your computer, usually inside the battery compartment.

edwar said:

Apple is no better. Hard drives fail all the time. That is a fact of the computer world.

Contact HP and get a set of system disc for your model. If you have another computer, or access to a friends, download the version of Win 7 your HP is running, Home/Pro/Ultimate, from My digital life. Look at the tutorials on this forum for Clean install factory OEM. You will need to use the license key that is on the COA sticker on your computer, usually inside the battery compartment.

I tried that, the install fails everytime

Use your win7 burned iso ..... Choose the 'Custom Install' Then you can make it one large partition freshly formatted,m and win7 should install ok then.

mikiep said:

Use your win7 burned iso ..... Choose the 'Custom Install' Then you can make it one large partition freshly formatted,m and win7 should install ok then.

I try that, still fails. Maybe the burned disk is corrupted or something?

Yes that could be the reason all the installs fail. Did jyou download if from My Digital Life? Try making a USB thumb drive installer after you Re-Download of Win 7 From My digital life.

Download Windows 7 ISO (Official 32-bit and 64-bit Direct Download Links) « My Digital Life

edwar said:

Yes that could be the reason all the installs fail. Did jyou download if from My Digital Life? Try making a USB thumb drive installer after you Re-Download of Win 7 From My digital life.

Download Windows 7 ISO (Official 32-bit and 64-bit Direct Download Links) « My Digital Life

Thanks for the link, downloading now.

Is there more to making a USB thumb drive installer than just putting the .iso on a USB flash drive?

We have a tutorial which provides everything needed to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

If the official ISO burned with tool provided fails to load from the booted DVD then reset BIOS to defaults: Clear CMOS - 3 Ways to Clear the CMOS - Reset BIOS

Set SATA controller to AHCI, DVD drive to boot first, then HDD, save changes and Exit.

If it still fails wipe the HD with Diskpart Clean Command and define an Active NTFS Primary partition for install as shown in Step 2.2 of SSD - HDD Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

Bad RAM can cause file copy errors and other weird things to happen. It might be worth your while to run Memtest or something similar to rule it out as a possible cause for your dilemma.