Factory reset from hard drive not working

[tracel66]

Hi can anyone help with a problem I am having with my laptop.

It all started when I was replacing my hard drive for a bigger one and I accidently  reformatted the wrong hard drive resulting in deletion of the factory recovery partition.

After several attempts I have managed to restore it using the home made recovery disks. This was not easy as when it gets to 99% complete it says "error press any key to undo restore"

I have found to over come this I need to press the power button to shut it off. On rebooting it looks to carry on and downloads HP files. After it looks like it has completed and several reboots and confiuration processes it eventually tries reboot but now says "no boot disk detected", To over come this I now need to insert the windows disk and run the "unable to boot to window " tool which fixes the problem and the laptop is now reset, as you can guess this takes a long time to do, so I want to recover from hard drive by pressing F2 on bootup.

Now for the problem,

If I now to try to do a factory reset from the recovery partition on the hard drive it now says "cant recover using hard disk use recovery media"

Anyone know how to get my laptop to recover using the hard disk recovery partition,

and why my recovery media fails to restore fully..

I do have two sets of recovery media as I originally had two identical laptops for my kids and  both sets  fail at exactly the same point.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

If you can still read the W7 product key on the notebook's case, see if you can make your own W7 64 bit Home Premium installation media and use the product key to activate the installation.

Here is the link to the W7 Home Premium 64 bit English (US - sorry...it is all I have), ISO file.

https://download.microsoft.com/download/E/A/8/EA804D86-C3DF-4719-9966-6A66C9306598/7601.24214.180801...

The link will be good for 24 hours from the time of this reply.

Use the Microsoft tool that I zipped up and attached below that you will need to transfer the ISO file to a DVD or USB flash drive, so that it is bootable, or you can use a different free utility such as Rufus.

[tracel66]

Hi sorry may not have made myself clear, I have an original copy of windows 7, it's the HP recovery software that does not work correctly. I want to restore the laptop to factory settings, not just reinstall windows.

Thanks.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome

I guess I did misunderstand you.

I thought you could not get W7 to install.

Unfortunately I would not be able to help you factory reset the PC, and I have to be honest with you, I highly doubt anyone else can either.

[tracel66]

Found the issue which was stopping me recovering using harddrive recovery partition, for some reason there was 2 HP tools partitions and recovery partition was named  E.

I removed the extra tools partition and renamed recovery to D and tools to E and now factory reset works from Hard drive.

Only issue now is once completed and re-boots it cant find a boot directory and I need to boot from windows 7 disk and it then automatically repairs boot issue, and starts laptop setup for first time.

Any one any idea how to solve this initial lost boot issue.