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- Notebook Operating System and Recovery
- I need a recovery media for HP-Pavilion g4

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03-15-2020 01:20 PM
No simple ones, I'm afraid! You can't download or recreate the Recovery parition; instead, you have to do a full factory reset to completely reformat the drive, and for that, you need HP Recovery Media -- and HP no longer sells that for Win7 PCs.
If all you want, however, is recovery media, then read on ...
I prefer to use third-party recovery solutions for the following reasons:
1) More flexibility and reliabilty -- can make recovery media as often as you like, not restricted to one attempt, which if it fails, then you are stuck.
2) More media options -- can create media in DVD, USB stick, or external drive format
3) Mounting option -- can "mount" the save images as virtual "drives" and extract individual files and folders
4) WinPE boot option -- can install a special boot option that allows you to boot to recovery information and do a repair or restore from there -- when Windows will not boot
What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive, USB stick, or DVDs
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD
My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.
I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 15 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore. Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinPE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!
NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive, USB stick or DVDs in only a few minutes.
Good Luck
I am a volunteer and I do not work for, nor represent, HP