HP recovery disk does not boot, any way to run from Windows?

[Fred_M_B]

For my Pavilion desktop, I had created a set of recovery disks (DVD's) as prompted. A few days ago, my hard drive crashed, and I replaced it with a new drive, but I have not been able to boot using the recovery disks. Attempting to boot from the DVD drive gives the error message, no boot disk found. 

I was able to download and install a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium OEM version 64 bit using a USB drive, but I am missing drivers, etc. 

Is there any way to execute the recovery disk from Windows, so that I can restore the drivers, etc? 

Any help would be appreciated. 

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Unfortunately, you can't run the recovery disks from the Windows environment.

Here is the link to the driver page for your model.  You should find all the drivers you need there.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-Pavilion-HPE-h8-Desktop-PC-series/5258496/model/...

If you have a problem finding some drivers, please post the name of the device and the hardware ID, so I can figure out what driver you need.

Use this guide for how to find the hardware ID for a device...

https://www.howtogeek.com/193798/how-to-find-drivers-for-unknown-devices-in-the-device-manager/

[Fred_M_B]

Thanks Paul. 

Any idea why the recovery disk (DVD's) were not bootable?

I did not think to test them after they were created. (I assume there is a way to cancel out of the recovery process before actually starting it.) 

Regards,

Fred

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Unfortunately, that I do not know.

Only the first disk you would have made would have been bootable.  

The others are inserted as prompted by the installation script.

On your model, I believe you turn on the PC, tap the ESC key to get a menu of options, then you select the F9 boot options menu, and from there, you select the DVD drive, press the enter key, and the PC should boot from the 1st DVD.

If you did all that, and it didn't work, I would agree that something didn't go right even though the program said it did.

I had a similar thing happen to me.   I made a recovery image using a program, which had always worked for me in the past, and other than this one time, it worked afterward as well.

The program reported the image was created successfully, but when I went to recover the PC using that image, the recovery process failed.  I had to reinstall W10 using a plain installation disk like you just did.

Go figure...one of those mysteries we will never know the answer to.