Restoration Incomplete - which partitions should I delete?

[Inyoka]

Had some issues when rebooting so I created an HP recovery disk and reinstalled.  Now I am stuck in a “Restoration Incomplete” loop.  CMD shows the error “The system cannot find the drive specified”.

After reading other posts it seems my best course of action is to delete my partitions first, however which ones should I delete?  I am assuming not the Recovery partition, are all the other partitions safe to delete?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

What I suggest you do is to make a bootable USB recovery drive using the HP cloud recovery tool.

That will reinstall W10, the drivers and the software that originally came with your notebook.

You will need to have access to another working windows PC and a 32 GB USB flash drive.

Here is an info link for how to use the utility...

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205

[Inyoka]

Thanks for the response.  I already have an HP recovery USB, and a Windows 10 recovery USB, and I have just created a gparted USB just in case.    Is the HP Cloud Recovery tool better than the HP Recovery USB?  

Just out of interest does this partition setup look normal to you?  it seems very complicated to me, although I havn't installed windows for 10 years or so.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome.

If you have a HP recovery USB, that would be the same as the one created by the cloud recovery tool.

When you clean install W10 (my preferred method, since i don't care to have the bundled software that comes with the HP image), I delete every partition on the hard drive, leaving just one partition of unallocated space, click Next and install W10.

Then I install the drivers and selected software I want from the support page.

When you clean install W10, the recovery partition will not work anymore because the software to access it has been removed by the clean install.

Therefore no need to have a huge waste of drive space occupied by a non-working recovery partition.

[Inyoka]

Okay, thank you.  I will erase all the partitions, however first I will try with the HP USB as I don't mind the HP stuff. If that fails I will use the vanilla Windows recovery USB.  I'll report back afterwards.  Thanks again.

[Inyoka]

Okay so after formatting the hard-drive completely with gParted the HP recovery USB still didn't work so I had to format again and reinstall with a standard Windows 10 Recovery USB as you suggested.  All is now working again.

Would it be worth partitioning off 200gb to keep Windows separate from my files?  I am a developer so I install a lot of development libraries and software etc. 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Glad your notebook is back up and running again.

I guess you can create a partition for files you need, or you can create a separate folder on the C:\drive.

Just make sure that you back up your files, because if the hard drive fails, it will take out any partitions you create as well.

[Inyoka]

Okay, a big thank you for your help.  Really appreciate it, I have tried to Reset and Reinstall about 10 times over the past few days.  I'll keep the partition in one piece for now.  Thanks again.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime.

Glad to have been of assistance.