Can't recover to new disk

[LancairDriver]

3 months ago I purchased 3 secondhand HP laptops PC 17-cn0013dx (37P29UA#ABA) to learn about Windows 11.  I installed an SSD (NVMe) to speed things up.  A month later, I began to have trouble booting and chkdsk gave disk errors, but fixed them.  

Two weeks ago, I ran the UEFI diagnostics and the original hard disk (1 TB) failed the DAT test.  All other components passed the UEFI diagnostics.  I replaced the original hard disk with a spare 160 GB Fujitsu.  The Fujitsu has enough space for the OS and passed all the UEFI diagnostics.  I downloaded the HP Cloud Recovery installer on another machine and ran it to create a recovery USB stick.  On the "sick" machine, I booted to the USB recovery disk and ran it.  After about 20 minutes and 10% progress, the recovery stopped with the message "There was a problem recovering your PC."  I was able to go to Troubleshooting, run Command Prompt and see files on the target hard disk.  I removed the SSD and tried again but experienced the same failure.  I have also tried a fresh install of Windows 11, but (after providing the Intel RST driver) it said "Installation has failed." or "There is an error selecting this partition."  

What should I try next?  I have an external case for the hard disk so I could attach it to another computer if that would help.  Thanks for any ideas.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

The only suggestion I can offer would be to try the clean install with the IRST drivers I zipped up and attached below:

The attached file is good for both W10 & W11.

Copy all of the files in both folders in the attached file to a USB flash drive.

Have the flash drive and your Windows installation media plugged into USB ports.

Boot from the W11 installation flash drive.

When you get to the screen where no drives can be found, click on the Load driver option, browse to the flash drive with the storage controller drivers on it.

If you check the box, it will only include the compatible driver.

Click Next, and W11 should install.

If you are running into partition errors as you indicated, clean the disk using the Diskpart utility when you are at the screen where that error occurs:

1. Press Shift+F10 from inside the Windows Setup screen to open a command prompt window.
2. Type diskpart and press the Enter key.
3. Type list disk to find your disk number.
4. Type select disk (e.g., select disk0) to choose the disk you want to clean.
5. Finally, type clean to wipe the disk completely.
6. Exit diskpart and install Windows.

[LancairDriver]

Thanks for your advice - that did the trick.  I don't know whether it was the advice to clean the new hard disk, or the driver you provided (which was a little different than what I extracted from sp153118), but thanks!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Glad to have been of assistance.