Failure to perform "system recovery"

[BJR2]

on power on i get a blue screen and choose your keyboard layout. select UK and then two options. turn off PC or troubleshoot. after following process for system recovery it eventually returns to blue screen with choose keyboard layout.

[WAWood]

@BJR2 

How old is the PC?  And how recently did this start happening?

Were you trying to do a System Recovery or a Factory Reset? An if so, WHY?

[BJR2]

PC is about 5 years old and out of warrantee. The problem came up a few days ago.

I'm not very pc literate, I have all important files backed up on an external hard drive so was attempting to reload factory system.

No matter what i do the blue screen with keyboard selection comes up after power on and after selecting UK the next screen gives option of power off or troubleshoot.

[WAWood]

@BJR2 

Somehow, the Factory Reset has taken on the value of an Urban Legend that is a Miracle Cure for any ailing PC. Not only does it rarely fix the PC, if there is an underlying hardware issue with the PC, it will make matters WORSE by leaving the PC in an unusable state.

Even if there is NOT an underlying hardware issue, the reset puts Windows back to where it was weeks or months ago -- and this will then automatically launch hours or days of Windows Udpates that will bring your PC to a grinding halt, driving the processor up to 100% and the disk utilization to 100% as well. Both of these do NOTHING to speed up the PC.

The HP Factory Reset function relies critically on the contents of the Recovery partition being intact. If those contents get corrupted, which can happen either due to hard drive failing or due to Win10 Upgrade from an older OS, the reset simply will not work -- and will TRASH the PC in the process.

So, you go from having a SLOW PC, to having NO PC. That's not an improvement.

To check for hard drive failing, 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, 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.