HP partitions and BIOS updates blew up my computer

[Baylorguy]

I have an HP Pavilion model 500-424, running Windows 10-64, that I purchased through Amazon on March 27, 2020. I also purchased a 3-year warranty through Asurian, but I have a problem that only HP caused. Actually, its two problems but the second one was aggravated to a large extent by the first one. First of all, when I got the computer and was downloading all of my files that I had backed up and putting them into the C: drive as we're supposed to do, after a few minutes the machine informed me that the C: drive was full. It shouldn't have been because the machine has a one TB drive. But when I looked at the partitions, sure enough the C: drive was small and was called the "recovery" drive, and the D drive was labeled as the primary drive with over 900 GB. So I contacted one of your people and they suggested I simply exchange the names of the partitions by turning C: to D:, and vice versa. So I tried that, but the machine would not let me change the name of the C: drive. So I changed the D to A: and tried again to change C: to D:. It wouldn't let me, so I just left it there and started downloading all my important files into the new A: drive. Then it dawned on me that if I was ever in a position to have to use system recovery, I would be in a pickle because the machine would not know which drive to use.

So I left things alone and let the C: drive do whatever it wanted to do. It gradually got bigger over the past year so I know its been collecting data. Then yesterday I see a red exclamation point in my HP Support Assistant and it informs me that there are eight necessary updates I need to do. So I do them and the first two go smoothly. Then the third one (something about the BIOS) completely screws everything up. It knocked the computer into what looked like a crude version of safe mode, flashed the monitor on and off, rebooted itself, and did the same stuff all over again. When it finally finished, the monitor was dark and it took a good five minutes to get it out of sleep mode. Then Windows told me to "reset" my PIN, so I did. And when I finally got everything booted back up, my primary email in Thunderbird had not only quit working, but all of my "sent" and "junk" and "trash" and all of the other folders were completely gone. Then as I was trying to decide whether or not to use system recovery, I remembered the possible issue I would have with the A: and C: drives and checked on them first. But my A: drive was GONE. All of my documents, photos, everything I had saved manually, were GONE. I searched the drive and can't find them. I do back up my files every month, so the only documents and photos I've really lost are the ones I've added since July 1, but still.... because of your initial screw-up with the reversed partition drives, and now with that update that blew everything up, now I am days behind and will have to find some way to fix my computer and get my files back. Ideally, I'd like to get the C: and D files back the way they were supposed to be, but never were.

I should add that I have already contacted HP Support through their Facebook page, but that is an exercise in frustration.  They keep writing back asking for the same information (serial number, Windows system used, etc.) over and over, and then they want me to call a tech at their call center, which I can't do because my vocal cords are damaged and its hard to understand me under normal circumstances, much less in a call center where a lot of techs are talking to customers at the same time in the background.  So I'm at a loss.  I want to salvage the files I lost so I can back them up because my fear is that I'm going to have to do a fresh Windows install in order to straighten out my partitions. 

[WAWood]

@Baylorguy 

There's lots of confusing information here, let me try to clear up some of it.

The "C" drive is the one containing the OS and system files -- and in the case of your PC, like others with two drives, it is the smaller one, usually an SSD, because of the speed advantage of an SDD over an HDD.

The Recovery drive is specially created and reserved for HP use.  If you touch it or write to it, you will corrupt it and after that, you will not be able to do any HP recovery.

The "C" drive is NEVER the Recovery drive -- they are totally separate -- and they have different drive letters, with the Recovery drive usually being "D".

I can not fathom why someone would tell you to do something so idiotic as swapping drive letters!  That, as you have found out the hard way, is a recipe for disaster.  In addition, the letter "A" is reserved for older PCs that had diskette drives, the first being "A" and the second being "B". By making that change, you only made matters worse.

What you SHOULD have done is gone into your Browsers and change the default download directory to the larger drive -- which would not have been "D", as that was likely reserved for the Recovery Drive. 

If you wrote files into the (formerly) recovery partition, you have now corrupted the recovery process and will not be able to restore from that.

So ... here is the current situation.  You will first need to insert a USB stick into your PC to save any personal files.  You can not save applications or any updates you downloaded, only personal files.

Then,  you will need to gat a 32GB USB stick and see if the instructions below allow you to make HP Recovery Media using the Cloud Recovery option.  If they do, then after backing up your personal files, boot from the Recovery USB stick and do a factory reset on your PC.  This will take a while -- couple of hours or more.

When that is done, the PC will reboot and you will be back to initial setup.

If your PC is a 2016 model or newer, you should see if you can make a bootable USB recovery drive using the HP cloud recovery tool on a working PC.

The recovery drive can then be used to install Win10 and the HP drivers and utilities that originally came with your PC.

Here is the link: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205