restore HP Envy from recovery partition after harddrive broke

[MarkDS]

Hi,

so I just lost pretty much an entire weekend trying to get this fixed to no avail, any constructive input would be appreciated.

The laptop has a 1TB HDD that had massive bad sectors in the C: partition. I bought a 500GB SSD, copied the non-damaged other partitions to it, and am trying to access the recovery partition that I copied to restore the computer on the new SSD. Encountered a plethora of issues trying this, with as result, computer still not booting into the recovery partition, and still not working.
I don't have recovery media for this laptop, thought the recovery partition would be enough for this, it seems UEFI and .wim files made it harder than this used to be.

any thoughts or is there a procedure to follow?

have a nice day,

Mark

[visruth]

Hi Mark,


If hard drive failed recovery partition gets corrupted and is rendered useless anymore. Bad sectors necessarily need not be present in recovery partition alone to make it useless. It can be anywhere, but it would affect recovery partition.

Have you done System Diagnostics testing from BIOS/UEFI to tests the hard drive? Did it give fail?

If you try cloning from a failing HDD to SSD, you're going to clone rendered useless recovery partition to SSD too. So that is not going to work at all. You shouldn't have copied recovery partition at all.

That is why all the HP Experts and volunteers here suggest to create HP recovery USB using HP Recovery Manager just after initial setup of your laptop

https://support.hp.com/in-en/document/c03821679

Your laptop came with Windows 8 64 bit from factory

Have you successfully upgraded and activated to Windows 10 Home previously? If so, you can clean install Windows 10 Home using this tutorial by creating bootable installation USB using Microsoft windows media creation tool:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-clean-install-windows-10-a.html

Alternatively if you've not upgraded, you can do a clean install of Windows 8.1 64 bit on your Windows 8 laptop using Microsoft windows media creation tool by creating UEFI bootable installation USB, follow this: https://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/18309-windows-8-windows-8-1-iso-download-create.html

https://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2299-clean-install-windows-8-a.html

Windows will be automatically activated after installation while connected to internet, in both the above scenarios.

Additional drivers from here:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-envy-17-j000-notebook-pc-series/5354973/model/53...


Regards

Visruth

[MarkDS · Accepted solution]

Thanks Visruth, it is "a" solution, but not the best one I found in the end:

the best solution I found up to now is to:

run chkdsk on the drive, or use spinrite or hdd regenerator or ... to reallocate all the bad sectors

clone the harddrive (partition wizard, clonezilla, ...)

install the new harddrive you cloned the system to

start the computer using a recovery usb drive made on a working windows 10 computer

run chkdsk /f on all drives, unmount them if asked

reboot again on recovery usb drive

rebuild BCD, procedure to be found on google

and TADA, computer is cloned, current windows is working, recovery partition maintained.

cheers!

Mark

[visruth]

You're welcome.

Did you check if recovery partition is still working now Mark?