The hard drive on my HP Pavilion laptop developed a problem and now won't boot. I was able to attach a USB SATA hard drive adapter and can see/access/and copy information from the drives and files on the bad drive.
- HP technical support instructs me to return the hard drive for replacement/repair.
- In order for HP to send a replacement hard drive, I have to first send the damaged drive to them. If I do this, then all of the currently accessible information on the damaged drive will be lost (a nice Catch-22 situation). I want to capture/transfer an image of the information from the damaged drive so that when HP sends me the repaired/replaced drive (with the Win 7 operating system installed) I can lay down the captured image and not have to endure the painful process of reinstalling all of my software and re-building all of the ancillary pieces.
- I have a second desktop computer available to copy information onto, and also a networked external drive. Is it possible to copy and save an image of my laptop hard drive (there appear to be 4 separate partitions "System", "Local Disk", "Recovery" and "HP_Tools", each with their own drive letter) with Norton Ghost 15.0 so that when the new hard drive is returned I can just copy the image information onto it? So far, I have not been satisfied with my attempts to accomplish this. The instructions just don't seem to be clear enough to answer my questions and guide me through this process if it is possible.
Any guidance would be appreciated.