New Hard Drive - Stuck in Restoration Incomplete

[Ticey]

(I spent several hours trying numerous recovery steps from this site and others to no avail.  I offered that so you all know I at least tried to fix this on my own before just right away jumping to the experts without doing some work on my own).

   Replaced the old hard drive with an SSD on a working laptop (just doing an upgrade).  I thought I was doing good by creating the Recreation Media from the Recovery Tool and saved that to a flash drive.  I installed the new hard drive, started it with the Recreation Media in the usb and it went through the Recovery process, however, I now have the RESTORATION INCOMPLETE message that won't go away.  (I just did this on my son's identical laptop and his hard drive was crashed so I didn't have the opportunity to create the Recreation Media, everything worked fine.)

   I had already downloaded the HP Recovery Tool from the HP Store (like I did on my son's laptop), and tried to boot it with that, but the Boot won't recognize the HP Recovery Tool and the system goes right to the Recovery Manager that shows the RESTORATION INCOMPLETE msg, (in case you're wondering, "RETRY" does not work-it just restarts and takes me back to the same message).

    Any advice?  I've been dabbling with the F9 and F10 options.  F9 offers me only 2 options: 1. BOOT FROM EFI HARD DRIVE and a long code (that has nothing to do with the name or description of my Flash Drive), and 2. BOOT FROM EFI.  Tried many options on both and if I can get it to try a boot it just goes to the Recovery Manager again so no help.  F10 I've disabled the Secure Boot option and listed the USB/CD ROM Drive as the #1 option.  (Obviously F11 takes me right to the Recovery Manager and the RECOVERY INCOMPLETE loop.)

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

The only suggestion I can offer if the HP Cloud recovery tool media isn't working, would be to clean install W10.

Make bootable installation media using the media creation tool from the link below.

Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

After W10 has completed installing, you can install the drivers and available software from your notebook's support page.

[Ticey]

   Thank you for the reply.  Just to give an update, (and possibly help someone else if they come across this issue), I was able to get the laptop back up and running.

   The Media Creation Flash Drive (I had originally made from the old hard drive) apparently had a glitch that wouldn't allow it to continue through the Restoration process, thus giving me the RESTORATION INCOMPLETE loop.  I took your advice and took that flash drive to the desktop where I was going to delete the files and reformat it to download the Bootable Installation Media like you suggested, but when I put the flash drive in the desktop it created a message that said there were errors.  It asked to scan (I did), then asked to scan and repair, I also did.  It only took a second or two and it  advised the flash drive is ready to be used.

   I took that same flash drive to the laptop and restarted it with that drive in the USB and it broke the cycle, taking me back to the Recovery Manager home screen where I was able to go through the "Restore back to Factory Settings" process and it worked.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Glad you were able to factory reset your PC.