Recovery drive creation & recovery partition help

[GGTUK]

Hi all. I'm new to HP and Win10. I've bought a new EliteBook 850 G5 3JX50EA#ABU Win10 Pro. I want to create a recovery drive but I'm unsure of the best way to do it.

My manuals say use HP Recovery Manager but my machine doesn't have this installed, although I have obtained a copy (sp45602.exe). I could use the Windows built-in recovery drive creation tool. I could buy the recovery media from HP (if available). I could use the HP Cloud Recovery Client which is available for download on my support page.

Is one method preferred over the others and do they all produce the same thing? I'm guessing they all create a bootable drive with a copy of the recovery partition. The Cloud Recovery Client sounds best to me as I assume HP continually updates the image, saving a lot of rebuilding after a recovery.

Also, I can't see a recovery partition in Computer Management. All I see is a 360MB EFI partition, a 878MB Windows RE Tools OEM partition and my primary partition. I was expecting to see a 20-30GB recovery partition. Do I have one? Is it hidden?

I'd be grateful if those who know about this stuff could enlighten me. Apologies if my questions are a bit dumb. Thanks in anticipation.

[banhien]

@GGTUK 

>>>>> The Cloud Recovery Client sounds best to me as I assume HP continually updates the image, saving a lot of rebuilding after a recovery.

I don't think so. Recovery using Recovery partition will bring you back to Factory settings and you have to run Windows update few times to bring it up-to-date. Microsoft updates Windows 10 image very often for downloading free and Windows tools also allow users to create image any time.

All my "production" laptops have 2 HDD's/SSD's. I clone them at least once per quarter. Anything goes wrong I can simply swap HDD/SSD. For one of my test machines, I also do the same.

For HP machines, I don't need Recovery partitions. When the time to donate come, I simply re-install Windows. And yes, you can order a set from HP but it will be out of date.

>>>>> I was expecting to see a 20-30GB recovery partition. Do I have one? Is it hidden?

If available, you can see it using Disk Management.

Regards.

[GGTUK]

Hi Banhien. Thank you for your reply. I'm still confused but I've been doing a lot of reading though. It seems recovery is done very differently in Win10 than in Win7 that I'm used to.

I don't have a 20-30GB recovery partition like in the old days because that's not how Win10 does it. That's probably why my laptop didn't come with HP Recovery Manager as well. I use "Reset this PC" and that boots this small Windows RE Tools OEM partition and somehow my laptop is factory reset from there, with all the original HP apps and drivers as well. That's fine because that's what I want.

I guess it's this small Windows RE Tools OEM partition that I need to back up. I've ordered a 32GB flash drive because I thought that was the size I would need but probably not now. When that arrives I'll try a "Create Recovery Media" and see what happens.

I'll call HP Support and get them to explain all this to me because I need to know how this works. They've obviously changed how they do recovery without properly updating their manuals. Anyway, thanks again.