Boot to recovery partition and generate recovery disks

[Bruce518]

Bought myself a new SSD to replace the 2TB HDD in my HP 15 notebook.  All my data is backed up but I do not have an image of the OS out on iDrive.  In the course of trying to clone to my new SSD, all the partitions cloned except the 1.8TB Windows partition because it had errors .  Running a windows disk check on it revealed some cross linked files which look to have been in my Windows folder.    If I boot to a live linux distro, I can see that all my partitions are intact, but in Windows/ folder in the Windows partition, there's basically an i/o error on the folder and nothing to be seen there.  Foolishly I did not generate recovery disks for this machine two+ years ago when I bought it.  Haven't done the reading yet on how to repair the MBR / UEFI boot mechanism as the last time I did a lot of this UEFI did not exist.     

5 partitions on m GUID Partition Table SATA HDD with a very timy bit of free space at the end.  Two are marked 'Microsoft Windows Recovery Environment (System, no Automount)' and 'RECOVERY'.  Is there an easy way to boot to those and generate my recovery CDs?   Can I generate a USB linux with GRUB and have it point at one of those partitions to boot it? 

I'm technical, but it's been a long time since I partitioned a lot of things and I'm out of practice and entirely unfamiliar with what UEFI brings to the table.  

AT this point I'm thinking if I can generate the recovery disks, I'd shove the new SSD in the machine and re load and then recover my data... 

If I hit 'Enter' to try again, my error message adds that \windows\system32\winload.efi can't be found with an error 0xxc000000e

Hitting F1 for recovery environemtn brings me back to the same error.  

So also F8... 

esc for UEFI brings me to a primitive BW boot / bios screen, and basically none of the options get me anywhere but the BSOD  with 0xC000000E... 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Your notebook should be supported by the HP cloud recovery tool which you can use to create a bootable USB recovery drive that will reinstall W10, the drivers and the software that originally came with your notebook.

Here is an info link for how to use that utility...

HP Consumer PCs - Using the HP Cloud Recovery Tool (Windows 10, 7) | HP® Customer Support

You will need to use another Windows PC running W7 64 bit or newer to create the installation media.

[Bruce518]

Thanks for the quick response.  One further question if you'll indulge me... The HDD chkdsk did turn up bad sectors and badly chained files.  Do you know iif the Cloud restore utility will restore to non-original hardware?  my new SSD is 2TB, same as the HDD.  I'm going to go download it and see what happens.  I think I'd prefer to restore to the SSD as that's my end game... 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

It should work on the SSD.

The only question I have is did you install a M.2 SSD and are keeping the 2.5" drive, or did you replace the 2.5" drive with a 2.5" SSD?

If you added a M.2 SSD, you will need to temporarily disconnect the 2.5" SSD or the tool will install W10 on the 2.5" drive.

If you swapped out the 2.5" mechanical hard drive with a 2.5" SSD, then you should be fine to run the tool as is.

[Bruce518]

This morning I replaced the HDD with the SSD and ran the recovery process from the USB drive.  I waited patiently for it to do its thing and have now been engaged in restoring all my files.  So far I've ben lucky and not too much has been missing.  That seemed safest as I could see that most of my files were intact when I booted a linux image and mounted the old drive.  It was pretty seamless.  Next will come installation of my applications.  Fortunately I've had lots of computers over the years and have gotten pretty good at recovery...