HP recovery manager missing on brand new laptop

[borgobor]

Dear All,

I just received my brand new hp zbook, and I tried to create my recovery media, as I always do when a new machine arrives my way. Unfortunately I discovered that although the laptop comes equipped with recovery partition, it does not have recovery manager installed. 

There are some recovery DVDs that came with the machine, but since the laptop comes without an optical drive I can't really use them to recover my system at one point or another.

How can I obtain/download a recovery manger software so that I can create a bootable recovery USB for my new machine?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated

Thank you

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

borgobor

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

This has been asked a lot, by folks who want a recovery USB instead of DVDs, and the answer has always been that HP does not stock those.

You can contact HP Customer Support yourself to confirm this:  

If you live in the US or Canada, contact information is on this page: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/contact-hp/phone-assist.html#section1

If you live elsewhere, contact information is on this page: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/contact-hp/ww-contact-us.html

NOTE: After you get through, stay on the line until you are finally able to talk to some one -- it can take a while!

If you have trouble finding a phone number, then try: 1 (800) 474-6836

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However, HP Customer Support is generally not available on the weekends, so you might have to wait until Monday to contact them.
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However, an alternative is to contact these other sites and see if they have the USB option:  http://www.computersurgeons.com/ and http://www.restoredisks.com/

If they do not, as I suspect will be the case, an alternative (which is the one I have used for a long time), is a third-party tool known as Macrium Reflect.

I personally prefer to use third-party Recovery solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 10 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.

Good Luck

[borgobor]

Thank you very much for your reply WAWood. Very detailed and lots of useful information.  Macrium Reflect sounds like the go to path from the options provided + can't beat the price :)...

I would love to share couple of ideas and have your feedback on them:

1. System Recovery through F11. I figured if the recovery manager is missing, but the recovery partition is there, I should be able to do a recovery through BIOS. Is there any catch in this recovery path (besides the recovery partition getting corrupted with time)?

2. I found some discussions in this forum that if I want to recover Windows 7 or install Windows 10 (my laptop came with windows 7 through downgrade rights from windows 10) I should use only the HP recovery software that came along with the laptop (the DVDs mentioned before)... The reason being is that both OS do not have activation keys and somehow the HP software communicates with the PC's UEFI firmware, where these activation keys are embedded. What I get out of this is that if I do a fresh install on Windows 7 or Windows 10 I will be asked to pay for activation unless I use the HP DVDs (that part doesn't make sense to me, but well, who am I to know the mysterious relationship between HP and Microsoft). This brings me to my question: can I create bootable USBs from the HP DVDs (on a different PC equipped with optical media) and what software would you recommend to do that?

Thank you again

[WAWood]

I will try to answer your additional questions ...

1. System Recovery:  If F11 does not invoke the HP Recovery Manager, you are stuck -- as there is no way to do this from the BIOS.

2. It is correct that the versions of Windows that come with HP PCs are OEM versions, and are not the same as those you would obtain directly from Microsoft.  The product keys associated with your PC will only activate OEM versions of the OS. So, if you install any other version, you would have to purchase a new license for it from Microsoft.

[borgobor]

Just a follow up if anyone reads this thread and maybe use some information from it.

Last night I was able to create a bootable usb out of the OEM version of the HP DVD. The instalation check starts OK upon reboot, but then a message pops up saying that I am using a version of the OS that cannot be activated as I am trying to use unauthorized copy of the OS... hmmm... OK then... I was lucky enough to be able to borrow an external optical drive, so I plugged the exact same DVD in and it did start loading the OS like a charm.

So long story short, converting the OEM version of the HP DVD into a bootable USB somehow does not work.

Exhausting all other options I am down to Macrium Reflect, as soon as my fresh USB makes it via mail 🙂

Thank you WAWood for your time and input 

[WAWood]

Sorry, I did not know that you were going to try to make a USB out of the Recovery DVDs yourself -- or I would have told you that does not work.  

I tried that myself for a laptop that does boot from USB and found out it can not be done.

[YourComp6]

Is this seriously your answer to this problem??  That is as unacceptable an answer as I have ever heard as I am having similar issue on your crappy, yet expensive, machine.  Really because i don't have software that should have come on machine i need to go buy it??  Do u ever wonder why apple is crushing you?

[kevin-t]

Hello,

Thank you for posting in this thread. Unfortunately based on when the last response was made, I have closed this thread to help keep comments current and up to date. We recommend starting a new thread for your issue. 
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