Factory reset using HP recovery disks hanging at 98%

[pierregf]

I burned a set of recovery disks when I bought the laptop.  It came preloaded with Win 8 and other bundled software. I have updated over the years to Win 10. A month or so ago it hung up after a windows 10 update, and simply would not start, hanging up just before windows was fully loaded. The microsoft techs guided me through setting up a bootable thumb drive with win 10 on it and I did a clean install of windows on C:. This of course lost me all of the preinstalled software and some of the HP drivers, so I decided to just do a factory reset and start over.

The recovery disk set has 6 DVDs in it. All goes well until the last disk which just sits at 98% and says please wait. The only sound is a cooling fan.

I shut it down and rebooted using a Ubuntu live disk. I ran Gparted to check the partition structure - there is a 105 Gigabyte ntfs partition with about 30 Gigs of data on it. The rest of the terabyte drive is unallocated.

There is a directory called RM in the 105 Gig partition. The RM directory contains a subdirectory named Image and a 20.6 Megabyte file named ESP.wim .

The Image directory contains the following files: Data.bin 3.7 Mb, Data.bin1 4.5 Gb, Data.bin2 4.5 Gb, Data.bin3 4.5 Gb, Data.bin4 4.5 Gb, Data.bin5 303.9Mb, Build.wim 360.6 Mb and Install.wim 9.16 Gb.

It appears as though it is waiting for the next command which never comes, which would start the process of actually formatting the entire drive, building the hidden recovery partition, etc.

Is there anything I can do to bump the process to the next step?

[IT_WinSec · Accepted solution]

Hello @pierregf

Thank you for posting in the HP Support forum.

Since you were able to boot from Ubuntu, using GPart/GParted, simply erase all the partitions and leave the HDD blank from partitions.

Try running the HP Recovery discs again and this may be able to help. Sometimes it works.

With regards to both Windows 10 and Windows 8 - even though you perform clean installation, all the drivers and most of the preloaded apps can be restored by downloading and reinstalling them from the HP website >> http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers

I'd recommend you turn to Windows 10 and try to re-loader drivers or apps from http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers

if the recovery procedure fails again.  I might be able to provide you with Windows 8.1 installation instructions for Windows 8.1 clean installation. Or you may check for a recovery media

Let me know how it goes

[pierregf]

Thanks for the input, I will certainly check into getting some of the preinstalled software back after a clean install.

A bit more patience was what it took, I walked away from it and in a couple of hours it finally came back to life and spit out an error message - it seems it took all that time to do a long disk self test on the 1 terabyte volume and found some bad sectors, so it looks like a new hard drive is required.