OK, I know this sounds like I am thick as a brick, but if it helps others avoid a case of the run-arounds, so be it…
I am going to ramble a bit, but bear with me as it is all information that will come in handy and save you some grief, IF you own this laptop…
I got a good buy on a pair of WD 1600B EVE 160 GB 2.5 inch HDDs and wanted to upgrade my HP dv8309us laptop from scratch, as I plan to use a ESATA RAID type 54 card to drive a 2TB external array for digital video capture via Adobe OnLocation and didn’t want old systems info slowing me down.
The HP dv8309us has capacity for two drives, but most come with only one drive installed, as did mine (a 80 GB).
When I first bought the laptop, I scavenged another 60 GB HDD from a friend, installed it and dual booted Ubuntu until now. The drives simply slide into the drive buss under a 3 screw cover on the bottom of the laptop.
Be sure you remove the AC AND the laptop battery before you start poking around the insides of your machine!
When you add the HDD, you can go through the effort of buying the HDD sled from HP for $38 (a beer can thick sliver of stamped aluminum), or just do what I did and roll up a small bit of white card stock to make a spacer between the back of the drive and the laptop. The clearance between the top and sides of the drive is very snug, so you only have to pad the end of the drive to hold it firmly. (I have been running like this for over a year now and NO problems…)
Anyway, I backed up my existing drives data, pulled both drives, replaced with the 2x 160 GB drives and popped the first recovery disk into the dvd drive and rebooted.
NO dice. DVD booted, gave me the option of restoring destructively or via the restore partition (obviously not there unless you buy a new, preformatted HDD from HP for major $$$), so I chose the destructive option.
The system appeared to format the system drive and install the HP recovery partition, but when the system rebooted to continue the install, it barfed and said no system disk was available.
No matter how many times I tried to boot from the DVD, it said there was not a systems disk.
So I downloaded the Western Digital Lifeguard tools and burned that to a CD with my desktop computer and tried formatting a 137GB partition for the computer to find and install the recovery partition.
The WD tools appeared to format the system drive and then the DVD again booted and installed the partition image, but crapped out upon rebooting to continue the restoration.
On a hunch, I reopened the drive bay, removed the 2nd hdd and went through the entire process again of formatting a partition with the WD tools and rebooting, and IT WORKED.
Seems you cannot do the restore with both drives in the system; at least I couldn’t.
Recap; If you want to upgrade BOTH of your HDDs in a HP dv8309us Laptop…
1. Backup all data.
2. Unplug all power and remove the battery.
3. Remove all HDDS.
4. Install ONE HDD in the “A” or primary HDD slot — they are marked on the plastic bezel inside the drive bays.
5. Use a bootable formatting utility, preferably one of the disk maker’s manufacture, to create an initial partition.
6. Shut down the laptop and put the 1st disk of the recovery set in the optical drive and reboot.
7. Follow the instructions on the screen. The recovery partition will be written, the machine will reboot and 4 or 5 hours later… viola! A restored machine that you get to nurse through a ton of Windows updates, but at least it is working!
8. Install the 2nd HDD and format as you wish after you successfully restore the OS.
The ironic thing is, I was just starting a live support chat session with HP when I figured it all out.
They got off way too easy for my taste…
Hope this helps someone else as thick as I am…
Frank