HP PC Reset Problem

[flatpack27]

Hi

I am trying to help out a neighbour who has a problem on their PC. The PC was originally shipped with Windows 7 Home but was upgraded, when the free upgrade option was available form Microsoft, to Windows 10 Home.

They had a problem with their wifi device vanishing after the Microsoft update in September so decided to do a PC reset. They then contacted me when it got to the following state.

The PC will boot to a Windows wallpaper screen but neither the keyboard or mouse will work. There is no dialogue boxes on the screen. The keyboard and mouse both work when you access the maintenance menus so are both fine.

The PC appears to be stuck part way through its reset process as the drive has the following partitions and has X: drive prompt if you access the drive from the command prompt using the maintenance menus.

Name                                                   Type

Drive 0 Partition 2 OS                      Primary

Drive 0 Partition 3 <No name>     OEM (Reserved)

Drive 0 Partition 4 HP_RECOVERY Primary

We've been through all the maintenance menu options and nothing allows us to progress to fix this. There are no restore points as its been reset and did't want to wipe the partitions, and reinstall from files from another PC, as not certain the Windows 10 activation will be found. They assure me their data has been saved onto an external hard drive.

I can boot using Sysrec, and mount the partitions, but without know what may need a helping hand to get it to complete the reset process I don't want to start chaning files. Ideally would like to get it to complete the reset without having to hack things about 🙂

Thanks for your help and guidance

Martyn

[WAWood]

@flatpack27 

You should have checked here before charging into this -- as we would have warned you that upgrading a Win7 PC to Win10 has the side-effect of corrupting the HP recovery information -- making a reset then something that will fail and leave you with a trashed PC.

And unfortunately, HP no longer carries the Win7-era Recovery Media, so there is nothing you can order from HP to use to reset the PC.

Of course the reset wiped the Restore Points -- that is how it works.,  You expected them to remain intact?

The good news is that when the Win10 upgrade was done, the activation information was stored at Microsoft.  So any future attempt to reinstall Win10 from their media will be automatically reactivated once back online.  If you have the Win10 media, you can do a reinstallation without worrying about reactivation -- just be sure to skip the product key request when that window comes up.

The bad news is that their media does not install any HP drivers, only generic ones provided by Microsoft.  So if the reinstall works and any hardware does not function properly, you are then stuck.

[SWETT]

Yesterday, I downloaded win 7 recovery media using the hp cloud recovery program. It is only available for some models listed in the dropdown in the cloud program.