Pc won’t recover in any way

[Josdavids]

Hello, big problem here. Windows 10 November update failed, no response after hours. Tried recovery with F11, several options, but all of them end in a black screen. No response from laptop. From the startup I did a systems check, all of that was oké, processor l, memory, ssd etc. Now I started from a cd with gparted installed on it. The ssd looks like in the image. What can I safely format without loosing the recovery partition?

many thanks. 

https://share.icloud.com/photos/0Ah18pnm6al2wNdUUOxp-Nr2w#Drachten 

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Josdavids 

If you're looking for WHERE to reinstall Windows, just point the installer to the 320GB unformatted space and it will create its own partition, format it, and populate it.

[Josdavids]

@WAWood

Since I could not choose the location of installation I used the media creation tool for windows 10. Put the usb drive in and I chose the 128GB location (if that is ok). It installed windows 10 and apparently it is activated the right way as windows 10 home. I made the usb drive from my other windows 10 pro laptop (legal version of course) but it installed the Home version, so I presume it knows what was installed on the HP in the past. So that works, but the recovery part is now not working anymore. I did not touch the D:\ drive. Gparted listed this drive as hidden but it was always visible previously in explorer. So F11 no longer works unfortunately. It’s running now but the graphics are not ideal. Only 4 resolutions to choose from. Updated with the latest drivers from the hp site regarding the amd r5 chip but I can tell from experience that the taskbar and startmenu are not at there normal color state.

[WAWood]

@Josdavids 

Sorry the HP Recovery no longer works, but that usually happens with fresh installs -- just that no one knows why.

I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.

[Josdavids]

@WAWood

I’ll will try the software mentioned to be more flexible in the future with problems. Sounds like a very versatile tool.

Thank you for your quick support.