Hard drive

[3dagr8]

I have a HP pavilion 360 and I’m trying to switch out my hard drive which is a solid state drive that has no operating system on it but my HP pavilion will not allow me to add one to the hard drive itself so I made a recovery disc on a flash drive and try to upload the OS system from there, but it keeps saying that the file is too small for the hard drive. How do I fix this.

[VikramTheGreat]

Hi @3dagr8,

Welcome to the HP Support Community.
 

Thank you for posting your query. I will be glad to help you.

I can imagine how frustrating this feels. You’ve gone through the effort of creating a recovery USB, swapped in a new SSD, and now the system throws an error saying the file is “too small for the hard drive.” That’s confusing and stressful when all you want is to get your Pavilion x360 up and running again. Let’s break down what’s happening and fix it.

Why This Happens

• The error usually means the recovery media cannot match the drive’s partition structure or the SSD is uninitialized.
• HP recovery expects the drive to be completely blank and properly formatted (GPT for UEFI).
• If the SSD is brand new, it may not have a partition table, causing the installer to fail.

Recommended Steps

Step 1: Confirm BIOS Settings

• Power on and press Esc → F10 for BIOS.
• Under System Configuration, ensure: 
  • UEFI Boot is enabled.
  • Secure Boot is ON.
  • Disable Legacy Boot.

Step 2: Prepare the SSD

• Boot from your recovery USB.
• When the error appears, press Shift + F10 to open Command Prompt.
• Type: diskpart
             list disk
             select disk 0
             clean
            convert gpt
            exit
• This wipes the SSD and sets it to GPT format.

Step 3: Retry Recovery

• Restart and boot from the recovery USB again.
• Follow the prompts to reinstall Windows.

Step 4: If Recovery Still Fails

• Download the latest Windows 11 installation media from HP:
  👉 HP Consumer PCs - Using the HP Cloud Recovery Tool in Windows 11 and 10 | HP® Support
• Install Windows, then use HP Support Assistant to restore drivers:
  👉 HP Support Assistant | HP® Support

I hope this helps.

Take care and have an amazing day!
 

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Regards,

VikramTheGreat