Cannot Restore Touchsmart 310

[corvettejoez06]

OK, PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! Read everything before you reply... This is VERY strange!

My HDD Crashed... So now I need to factory restore with either Win7 or Win10 (don't care which one, if I can get EITHER to work).

I "thought" luckily I made both a Win10 Boot disk restore (when win 10 was installed) and I also made the 5 disk system restore set (win 7)

So, here are the very weird things that happen:

When I try to do win 10 and it gets to the "select keyboard" screen, there is NO FUNCTIONING KEYBOARD OR MOUSE! Which I have found to be a VERY VERY well documented issue that HP never cared enough to fix. I say again, a VERY VERY VERY well documented issue with Win 10 and the 310... YES I TRIED MANY MANY MANY (LIKE 6 TOTAL) Different keyboards and mice... So, Win 10 won't work......

So, I try the 5 disk win7 restore... it starts correctly... windows file loading...etc etc etc... then it pauses on the "blue screen" where the next screen "should" be the Black HP screen asking you what you want to do... well, it never gets there, and just reboots... and back to the loading windows files... over and over... and there is NOTHING on the HDD to change the BOOT from DVD to HDD... so... THAT DOESN'T WORK....

So, then I thought, well let's try to just put the HDD in an external case and do the 5 disk restore... well, NOW it makes it to the Black Screen ONLY to say that the HDD is SMALLER then the factory... ACTUALLY it's NOT, its 1TB, I just think that it is NOT registering it because it's connected USB external... so, can't do anything there!!!!

I tried to use ANOTHER computer to do win10 or win7.... with the HDD that I want to load as an external Drive... when I try the HP 5 disks, I get the error that it doesn't work on this computer because it's NOT HP

When I try the win10 it can't find the HDD and is asking me to load the drivers....

So, it's SAD! I did EVERYTHING TO be prepared for a failure... except buying a computer from a BETTER COMPANY......

Let's hear your thoughts... hopefully I can get some good ideas....

[A4Apollo]

Hi! @corvettejoez06, Thank you for visiting the HP Forums! A great place where you can find solutions for your issues with help from the community!

I understand you have issues restoring your PC back to factory settings.

Don't worry I'll try to help you out.

Did you make any software or hardware changes on your PC?

Have you tried running a hard drive diagnostics on your PC?

Please provide the product number of your PC to assist you better.

As you mentioned you are trying to restore the image using the recovery discs you have created.

Try running a hardware diagnostics on your PC and let me know the results.

Refer this article to know how to run system diagnostics test on your PC.

Also, since you have created the recovery discs by yourself, the discs might have gone faulty or the recovery process has not completed successfully.

So please contact HP and order a set of recovery discs and check if it helps.

Link to contact HP.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Have a great day! 🙂

Please click "Accept as Solution" if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.

Click the "Kudos, Thumbs Up" on the bottom right to say "Thanks" for helping!

[corvettejoez06]

Thank you for the attempt, even though that was a generic answer and most questions were answered already.

I would love to keep going back and forth just for fun, but I will keep it simple for future searches.

GPT vs MBR

When I initialized the HDD I chose GPT, apparently, my OLD HP doesn't support that, so that is why it kept rebooting when it should have been taking me to the Black HP screen.

So BLUF... Solved... (at least the Win7 issue), like I said... the win 10 issues will obviously never be fixed.

[mdklassen]

For your computer: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-touchsmart-310-1000-desktop-pc-series/4273627/mo...

the HP website does not list any device-drivers for Windows 10.

This usually means that the necessary device-drivers are included on the Windows 10 installation media.

See: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

to download the "March 2017 Windows 10 Creators Update".

Connect the brand-new disk-drive as an internal SATA disk-drive.

Try installing from either the USB memory-stick or the DVD-recordable(s) that you just created.

Since your computer was running Windows 10, you were granted a "digital entitlement" to re-install Windows 10, at any time, at no cost to you.

If asked for a 25-character product-key, just click "Skip" or "I do not have one.

The first time that Windows 10 connects to the Internet, it should "activate".

The change in the disk-drive from the previous installation should not be "big" enough to cause the activation to fail.