I have decided to take this opportunity while gainfully unemployed to restore my laptop to factory programming. I found the original disc that came with it while cleaning out my desk and want to put it to use.
I have an HP dv9000, with 2 hdd [obviously c drive and d drive, which is just a data drive]
I have all my ebooks, pictures, and music already on the D drive. I really dont want to lost my saved email in thunderibrd, and I know that I can turn my firefox bookmarks into a file and stash it on the d drive also. How can I store my saved emails on the d drive?[and get them back into thunderbird again]
My main question is, once I have saved everything I want to keep on the d drive, and shove my disc in and tell it to work its voodoo, will it also clear out and refresh my d drive back to original imitation virgin?
I hate the idea of screwing up my emails and assorted files…
Will it wipe the D: drive? Possibly. I’d disconnect the D: drive before starting the rebuild. I’d also use an external USB drive and backup both drives. Just in case.
Yes, it’s possible that a factory-supplied recovery disk will wipe your d: drive. These disks are often designed to restore the machine to the condition it was in when it first shipped.
The suggestion to disconnect the D: drive is a good one, but it’s possible that there is only one physical disk and that it’s partitioned into two logical drives. If that’s the case, there’s no way to disconnect one drive without also disconnecting the other. The laptop I’m using at the moment is set up this way.
In short, you might get lucky, but I second the advice Quartz gave to backup everything important on both drives before you do this.
now about the part about my email … ? Or when I back up thunderbird, the email goes with it? For some odd reason, when I still had netscape and I moved my stuff onto my desktop from my old laptop no email went with it …
Are you 100% sure that D: is a physical drive and not a partition? If its just a partition then the installer will most likely wipe the entire disk down. In that case go buy or borrow an external USB drive or copy the contents to a network share.
Thunderbird exports are done with some free tool. Just google for “Thunderbird” and “backup” and you’ll find it. You can also just copy your Thunderbird profile. You can google for the location of that. On the new PC you would just copy it back, reinstall TB, and off you go!
Also if the D drive is NTFS then after you reconnect it under the new install you might get a permissions error. If so make sure to give yourself ownership of the files and give you user account read/write permissions.
Well, I am pretty hesitant about mucking around inside this laptop - I just lost my job thanks to the whole economic shit going on and cant afford to replace it. i can justify getting an external drive, a person I work with has a 1.5 tb seagate he is willing to sell me for $50US, he won it in an office contest. I checked in hardware and it has 2 HDD, but to make sure I will just shift everything over to the external.
Now, I did write down the keycodes for all the programs I have, nero and so forth [so i dont have to buy them again,…] but if I shift stuff to the 3d drive, after i reformat i just shift it back?
Scary, I can build a system, but I have never done anything like this, I normally shifted my bookmarks, and jpg/doc/mp3 files and gave someone my old computer…
I have one of the HP dv9000 series and on mine there are 2 separate physical drives. You can check this in Windows:
Right click My Computer, select Manage Computer.
In the new window, select Disk Management. Check the bottom half of the window, partitions on a single drive are shown on the same line. Physical drives have their own line.
If the drives are not just partitions, you should be able to remove the drive unit that corresponds to D then boot the PC up and do your thing.
If you are wiping completely and reinstalling from scratch you will need to reinstall and re-register your apps.
When you have it just the way you want it, my advice would be make an image of the C drive using something like Ghost or DriveImageXML (freeware, works like a charm) and put that on your external drive.
No. You can transfer your data but you have to install the programs.
For instance, if you have some chapters of a book you have written with WhateverWordProcessor you use … you can just copy the chapters of the book (data) back and forth … but you cannot just copy the WhateverWordProcessor folder to a different drive … you must install the word processor program on the newly formatted drive … therefore, the file(s) you need to copy are the installation files for the program, the program you ran that installed WWP.