Envy M6 - installing OS on new hdd

[sweetpoison]

Hi,
I just replaced my old hdd with a ssd and of course I had to use the recovery disk (5 dvds made when I bought the laptop).
So i did. There are 3 options for installing the OS and all of them got me to the same point where the install is asking about recovery media. No additional informations about what exactly is asking for and no other options not even to turn the laptop off... That stage is after a bunch of programs got installed (3rd reboot since the restoring starts).
Looking at the partitions made during restore I've notice the last partition on ammount of 8Gb where all the restore software was suppose to be. On the old hdd that partition have 24Gb alocated and it's full...
Is that the problem with that bunch of dvd? So far I think the all restore disk is designed to work combined with the informations stored on hdd. Anyway, I wasted a lot of time to get nowhere and one thing for sure, I am NOT going to pay twice for same product (the OS on this matter).
Any suggestions? Thanks in advice.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@sweetpoison

The problem is that the recovery disks are designed to work with a drive the same capacity as the original.  If your SDD is a lot smaller, that will not work -- which is probably the issue you are seeing.

If you want to replace an HDD with a smaller SDD, you have to setup using a larger HDD first, then shrink down the paritions to fit onto the SDD, then migrate them to the SDD.

Good Luck

[sweetpoison]

Thank you for answer.

What you say it makes sense so much that scares me. In the mean time I changed the labels from "recovery disks" to "fresby" (although even as fresby are are still not working properly).

I will give one more go to clone tools (about 5 hours to complete cloning because of USB speed) and if is not working I will just buy a regular winblows licence since is the cheapest option and forget about all the HP restore crap.

Hard to believe but I miss the good old days when I use to spend 4h for installing windows 3.11 from floppy disks. That was so much faster compared with so "advanced" 2017 even if the goal remain the same: install a fresh OS.

Sorry HP, I am very dissapointed regarding the operating system and how is set up on your laptop.