System Recovery Kit for dv7-3165dx fails to restore factory image to replacement hd

Question

I'm posting this wall of text here in case someone else has any suggestions before I contact HP Support to see what options they have.
My attempt to recover the factory image to a replacement hard drive in an HP Pavilion dv7-3165dx notebook is failing. An error occurs when SM.exe is trying to merge the WIM files. The SSRD.Log shows an error:
SM, 13, Set reference file fail
after that, SM.exe displays this message when run from a command line:
SM, Failure, Can not load imagex 1 from src WIM file
The following are the symptoms that the Recovery Manager displays on the screen.
The Recovery Manager reads the two DVDs and after a few seconds, it pops up an error message:
Reducer
C:\RM\Image\TempBASE.WIM was not found.
The message has on "OK" button that when clicked on, closes the message window.
After that, nothing happens. No disk or DVD activity for over an hour. The mouse moves, but no key presses have any effect, including CTRL-ALT-DEL. You can use the mouse to move the Recovery Manager window around, and there is nothing hidden behind it. Clicking on the Recovery Manager Back, Next, or Cancel buttons produce no response at all.
The only option at this point is to hold down the power switch until it powers down.
When the power is turned back on, the hard drive boots and Recovery Manager displays a message that incorrectly claims "Recovery is complete" and has a "Click Finish to restart" button. After clicking on "Finish", it reboots but since the System Recovery did not actually complete, all it does is display:
BOOTMGR is missing
Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart
Before attempting the recovery, the notebook passed all diagnostic tests.
The 2x2GB memory cards, which still have HP stickers on them, were tested with Memtest86+ V5.01 and completed over six passes in over seven hours with zero errors.
The replacement 500GB HGST Travelstar Z5K500 drive was tested with gsmartcontrol. The SMART status showed no errors in the past with over 400 hours of power-on time. Both of the SMART short self-test and extended self-test tests were run, which it passed without any errors.
The HP System Diagnostics from the Startup Menu were run on the memory and hard drive and they passed those tests without any errors.
While waiting for the HP "System Recovery Kit for Consumer Notebook (3 Disks)" Software Part Number 599357-001 to arrive, both Fedora 21 64bit and Windows Vista 64bit were successfully installed on the harddrive.
Both System Recovery DVDs were read on different machines without any errors. This System Recovery Kit supports the notebook's System Id which is 3638, so they appear to be the correct discs.
Now a list of workaround attempts that were suggested.
After the Recovery Manager failed a few times with the same error message, some googling came up with other users mentioning the "TempBASE.WIM was not found" error message. I tried these suggestions that I read about.
Run KillDisk to fill the HD with zeros.
Running Recovery Manager after that failed with the same error message.
Run the CyberLink Recovery Discs Utility (sp44645.exe).
Running Recovery Manager after that failed with the same error message.
Installed Windows VISTA 64bit again and upgraded the BIOS from F10 to F13.
Running Recovery Manager after that failed with the same error message.
Try only using a single 2GB memory card to see if it was a 64bit problem.
Running Recovery Manager after that failed with the same error message.
The BIOS does not have an option to change from AHCI mode to IDE mode.
I don't have a Windows 7 OEM install disc and am trying to avoid spending $100 to buy one.
That is when I decided that it is not a PC hardware problem, but a problem with the HP System Recovery Kit. Here are the details of what I think the Kit is doing.
After running Recovery Manager and getting the error message, instead of just re-booting and letting the "Recovery is complete" message appear, I re-booted with a Linux USB drive and inspected what was on the hard drive.
fdisk -l shows this:
Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa5dddc41
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 409600 143013887 142604288 68G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 * 143013888 143833087 819200 400M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
fsarchiver probe shows this:
[======DISK=] [=============NAME====] [====SIZE==] [MAJ] [MIN]
[sda                     ] [HGST HTS545050A7                ]  [  465.76 GB] [     8] [     0]
[=====DEVICE] [==FILESYS==] [=====LABEL=] [====SIZE==] [MAJ] [MIN]
[sda1                 ] [ntfs                  ] [<unknown>      ] [     68.00 GB] [    8] [     1]
[sda2                 ] [vfat                  ] [SDV                     ] [  400.00 MB] [   8] [     2]
Running gparted shows about 200 MB of unallocated space before the sda1 NTFS partition. The rest of the disk is unallocated after the bootable sda2.
The sda1 NTFS partition has a \SSRD.Log file and an empty \RM\Image directory.
The sda2 FAT32 partition has the Recovery Manager application files in it:
/mnt/sda2:
total 400
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15 Apr 9 23:36 SDV.FLG
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Apr 9 23:36 SYSTEM.SAV
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 1 2009 BOOT
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 1 2009 EFI
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 1 2009 SOURCES
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 27 2009 TOOL
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 383562 Jul 13 2009 bootmgr
The SOURCES directory has boot.wim, and the TOOL directory has all the programs, like Reducer.exe and SM.exe, in it.
After shutting down the Linux system and rebooting, the Recovery Manager then boots from sda2 and displays the "Recovery is complete" message and "Click Finish to restart" button. During this process, it removes the sda2 partition and marks the sda1 NTFS partition as the active bootable partition. When the PC restarts, all that is left is the sda1 NTFS partition with the empty C:\RM\Image directory and the SSRD.Log file, so there is no BOOTMGR to boot with.
The SSRD.Log file logs the tasks that the Recovery Manager performs.
The Recovery Manager runs some initialization tasks and then reads the two System Recovery DVDs. It then calls MergeWimFile which runs SM.exe and starts to merge BASE.WIM with the other BASE*.WIM files. SM.exe merges 20 WIM files with log entries like these:
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE22.WIM
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE23.WIM
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE3.WIM
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE4.WIM
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE5.WIM
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE6.WIM
SM, Success, refName= C:\RM\IMAGE\BASE7.WIM
Then, with only two WIM files left, BASE8.WIM and BASE9.WIM, the log shows:
SM, 13, Set reference file fail
This must be when Recovery Manager pops up the "Reducer C:\RM\Image\TempBASE.WIM was not found" error message.
That narrowed down the problem.
I copied all of the WIM files and the TOOLS directory to a Windows 8.1 system. The two DVDs did not have any errors while being read. Running SM.exe from an admin Command Prompt with the same parameters that were logged in the SSRD.Log produced the same error message. There was an additional error message that appeared in the Command Prompt window:
SM, 13, Set reference file fail
SM, Failure, Can not load imagex 1 from src WIM file
and the TempBASE.WIM was not created.
SM.exe /? did not provide a help message. I could not find any documentation on the SM.exe command.
If I removed three of the WIM files, (BASE7.WIM BASE8.WIM BASE9.WIM) then SM.exe could create the TempBASE.WIM file, but it would fail while merging index 2 of 3 with this message:
SM, 11%, Merge index 2 of 3 Processing
SM, Failed, Export image failed
The TempBASE.WIM is 3,421,518 KB in size after that.
This is where I came to a dead end and cannot think of anything else that I can do. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but it appears to me that there was some kind of error building this System Recovery Kit and it is not able to perform a factory install on this notebook.
ps
If I can figure out how to add an attachment, I will add the SSRD.Log file.  If not, then ask and I will post it as a followup.

Answer 1

Downloaded Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit which contains the latest imagex program.
Running imagex.exe on the BASE7.WIM file on the second System Recovery DVD:
imagex.exe /info K:\PRELOAD\BASE7.WIM
ImageX Tool for Windows
Version: 6.2.9200.16384
Error opening file [K:\PRELOAD\BASE7.WIM].
The data is invalid.
The same error message is shown for BASE7.WIM, BASE8.WIM, and BASE9.WIM.
The other WIM files in the PRELOAD directory, BASE5.WIM, BASE6.WIM, BASE10.WIM, BASE13.WIM, BASE15.WIM, BASE17.WIM and BASE23.WIM, could be read by imagex without any errors.