Critical Error - Partition not found

[ajc2808]

Hi everyone,

I was wiping my PC to factory settings and midway through it got stuck into a cycle of restarting itself. 

Now I am being told that there is a critical error and no partition can be found. I have a USB recovery drive sent from HP in the past, but this isn't working either. The HP recovery manager says I should plug in the "supplementary drive", or press cancel if I didn't receive one. I press cancel and then I get the same issue - no partition found, critical error.

Help?! 😞

Thanks in advance!

[WAWood]

@ajc2808

You were NOT wiping your drive because the factory reset does not do that; instead, all it does is erase the partitions on the drive and recreate and repopulate that.  That is essentially erasing the drive, not wiping it.

The Recovery Media is designed to work with an existing drive or even a new, blank drive of the same capacity as the original.  So, it does not care about a lack of partitions on the drive since it is going to recreate them all, anyway.

Sounds to me like the Recovery Media is corrupted and if that is the case, it is not going to work -- but if the drive is faulty, you could get much the same results as you are getting now.

So, let's check that first, because if it is failing, it would need to be replaced and there is no point then in doing anything else until we confirm that.

If your PC is new enough to support UEFI, you can use these steps to test the hard drive: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00439024

If not, to check the drive you have to follow these steps:
1) Press Esc key repeatedly, several times a second, while rebooting the laptop. Do NOT hold the key down, just press it over and over.
2) Eventually, you will see an HP Startup Menu
3) Press the Function key for testing the hard drive (usually F2) and let it run.