System Recovery does not work

[MRM4TN]

I have an older HPE H8-1230 machine where the hard drive on it failed a couple of years ago. It's a Win7 64-bit machine. I bought a new PC and luckily was able to get things transferred over. I have decided to get a new hard drive and get the computer back to its original state. I made a recovery USB and also found a site that sells recovery media for all kinds of machines. Using either one, I get a message saying "system recovery media does not support this computer." I can't find a lot of info online about what this means and if there's a way to get around this. I hope somebody on here can help. Thanks.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I wouldn't be able to help you with why the recovery media doesn't work, but if you can still read all 25 characters of the W7 product key on your PC's case, you can make your own plain W7 Home Premium 64 bit installation media.

Here is the link to the W7 Home premium 64 bit ISO file.  The link will be good for 24 hours from the time of this reply.

https://download.microsoft.com/download/E/A/8/EA804D86-C3DF-4719-9966-6A66C9306598/7601.24214.180801...

Use the Microsoft tool that I zipped up and attached below that you will need to transfer the ISO file to a USB flash drive, so that it is bootable.  In order to use a DVD, you would have to have a dual layer DVD and a DVD drive that can burn a dual layer DVD.

After W10 has completed installing, you can install the drivers and available software from your PC's support page.

HP Pavilion HPE h8-1230 Desktop PC Software and Driver Downloads | HP® Customer Support

[MRM4TN]

Thanks. I will give that a try and see what I can do with it.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

[MRM4TN]

I am having trouble with the utility. I have ran it 3 or 4 times. When it gets to the end, it says it's unable to run bootsec to make the USB device bootable. Any way to prevent that?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Try Rufus to make the bootable USB flash drive instead.

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

You can also try to boot from the installation media and see if that is a false report.

[MRM4TN]

I was able to get the CD/DVD tray to work. It started to install Windows, then came up with an error message. It gets stuck on expanding windows files. Then gives an error message that says "windows cannot install required files, file may be corrupt or missing" with an error code 0x80070017. What's corrupt, the windows installation? The hard drive I'm copying to is brand new.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, I wouldn't know what the problem could be.

You don't need any special drivers or whatnot to install W7 on that model.

[MRM4TN]

Is the installation media corrupt? I burned it to a DVD since I couldn't get it to install from a USB drive.

[itsmyname · Accepted solution]

@MRM4TN  -- if you can still read all 25 characters of the Windows 7 product key on your PC's case, you can use that key to try to install Windows 10 onto your computer. 

You can Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

and burn one single-layer DVD-disk, or write to one 8 (or larger) GB "empty" USB memory-stick.

Boot your computer from this installer media, and enter the product-key.

After, download the HP Assistant, and it will download all the HP-specific device-drivers.

Note that Microsoft's support for Windows 7 ended in January 2020, while Windows 10 will be supported until Spring 2025.