New Installation of Win 10 vs HP Recovery Media

[njg1]

Hello All

I was planning on cloning my Spectre x360 hard disk for backup purposes, and then format the drive to install of fresh Win 10 O\S from Microsoft's Media Creation tool, but wondered what issues if any would arise by doing this rather than using the HP recovery media.

The reason for this method is really to just install the software I want, instead of all the factory shipped content.

I would be installing the Win 10 Pro version too. My existing O\S is the Home version.

I would then download the HP support assistant and latest drivers, and re-install my own software.

The only concern I thought about was with the Intel Optane technology. Would this require any particular setup, or does the Win 10 installation set this up as it goes?

As mentioned, after the new installation, I would download all the HP drivers anyway.

The Spectre x360 I have, is the 2020 version 13" 4K screen, Intel i7.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks

Rgds

Nick

[WAWood]

@njg1 

Yeah, I understand your goal of wanting to get rid of all the "bloatware" -- but that gets rid of all the HP drivers, too -- and that is NOT a good thing!

What you need to do is follow these instructions to make a backup of the HP drivers: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/68426-backup-restore-device-drivers-windows-10-a.html

After that, you can do a clean install with MS media and then, restore the HP drivers from the backup you made.

And after you get all that done, you should consider making your own recovery media ...

------------------------

I personally prefer to use third-party Backup solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives.

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 or USB stick
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 WinRE, 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 or USB stick in only a few minutes.

Best of both worlds!

[njg1]

@wawood

Thanks so much for the detailed information.

I know when I tried to clone my drive using Acronis True Image a few weeks ago, I ran in to problems with the image process, as the current version didn’t have support for the Intel Optane technology to correctly work.

It was flagged up in Acronis tech support, and Optane support was in the pipeline for future revisions.

Not sure if MR is supporting Optane ?

That was my main concern with a fresh installation too. Does Win 10 recognise Optane during installation?

I was hoping I could just install the O/S and then download the specific HP drivers and the HP support / diagnostic software that was originally preloaded.

I will certainly try your method, and see how it goes.

Thanks again for your time and help. 🙂