Extreme difficulty booting to a USB drive

[mclarke67]

I am trying to help a neighbor with her HP 14-fq0110wm notebook. She has gotten it infected with malware to the point that after several minutes, the pop-ups use so many system resources (ram, CPU cycles) that the device is effectively worthless.

It is a budget notebook and set to Windows 11 S mode. So, I am unable to run regular Windows *.exe files, since only Appstore apps are allowed. It is not my laptop and I am hesitant to change it to regular Windows 11. So, I am trying to create a bootable Norton recovery USB drive. This process seems to be impossible.

The BIOS has NO option for legacy boot. Every time I try to use a RUFUS-created Norton recovery USB drive, the boot process tells me that the drive "failed". There is no problem with the USB drive, as I have also installed the Windows 11 installer to it and the Windows boot to USB process worked fine.

Here are the options I have already tried:

1. Disabled Secure boot - had to set an admin password before I was allowed to disable it, but it is now off.

2. Moved the USB drive option to the top of the boot order

3. Used Rufus to burn the Norton recovery image to the Sandisk USB key (8GB) in BOTH MBR and GPT formats, neither will boot.

I am not sure what exactly is wrong and why Legacy boot was removed from this BIOS. It's a GIANT PITA. Does anyone have any other ideas I can try? I am working on creating a bootable Linux distro with WINE, so I hopefully would be able to run some Windows malware remover, but I don't have high confidence in that process.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

The only suggestion I can offer would be to use the HP cloud recovery tool to create a bootable USB recovery drive that will reinstall Windows, the drivers and the software that originally came with the PC.

Here is an info link for how to use the utility.  You will need a 32 GB USB flash drive to create the recovery media with.

HP Consumer PCs - Using the HP Cloud Recovery Tool in Windows 11 and 10 | HP® Customer Support

You can download the software from the Microsoft Store.

HP Cloud Recovery Tool - Microsoft Store Apps

Since you have to use the utility on another PC, you will need to enter the notebook's product number in the tool's search window in order to proceed to make the recovery media. 

The PC's product number is:  5Z7Y9UA#ABA