system restore

[junk4mike]

Hi guys, windows on my hard drive crashed and I've been unable to restore it successfully. After I do a restore it still won't boot. The error is bad BCD file.  I made a recovery disk on a thumb drive but I can't get the machine to boot from it.  Is there any way to get some bootable restore media ?

Thanks 

Mike

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Since your PC seems to have originally come with W8.1 from HP, you can order W8.1 recovery media from the W8.1 driver section of your PC's support page.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-ENVY-700-Desktop-PC-series/5399651/model/5399839

Before you do that, try making your own bootable W10 installation flash drive to reinstall W10.  Watch this video.

The only variation would be what version of W10 you need to install...Home or Pro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjmRWFepwxk

Now as far as getting the PC to boot from the installation media...

Sometimes you have to go into the BIOS, enable Legacy Mode and disable Secure boot.   See this link for more info.

While this pertains to booting from DVD's, oftentimes you have to do this for USB flash drives as well.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03659945

After you make those changes, with the bootable media in a USB port, turn on the PC, tap the ESC key at the beginning of the HP welcome screen to get the menu of options.

Select the F9 boot options menu, and from that, select the Legacy USB diskette on key/USB flash drive, and press the Enter key.

The PC should then boot from the USB flash drive.