Why some USB flash drives do not work with HP Cloud Recovery

[GMorse]

The HP Cloud Recovery tool will sometimes refuse to detect a disk.  Now I disassembled CloudRecovery.exe with IDA Pro and found the pertinent code.  It logs a message of "GetRemovableUsbDiskList" followed by 'after filtering by USB, Capability 7, and size:'.  In between this it calls a routine which compares a property of the drive with either "fixed" or "external".  Unfortunately some pen drives are detected as "fixed".  Now in assembly code the call can be removed with 0x90 NOP instructions.  However doing this causes a bootable flash media to be written which just crashes and reboots.  Obviously some type of Class ID for the drive type is being used in a fragile recovery process.  So for HP to fix this would require a bit of work in their boot.wim along with changing the Cloud Recovery tool to allow them.  But its hard for them to detect which "fixed" drives are really fixed and which are falsely reported.

Many questions have been asked about this.  I thought I would give a definitive answer for anyone who wants the true technical details of what is going on.  You may end up needing to buy another flash drive.  Unfortunately HP is not giving out information on which brands work and which do not.  So you might want to find stories from people with specific model drives that do in fact work before just buying any random drive.  My Sandisk Cruzer Orbit 32GB does not work.  My Sony 64GB drive does work though I am not sure of the specific model.

For some odd reason HP refuses to give out these technical details and just tries to force ordering of recovery media.  But a handful of technical details could literally solve hundreds of questions asked here without such cumbersome things.  Some of the factory partitions for example are literally flawed containing a McafeeMLS installer which causes a reboot and destroys the recovery process.  You can either use the cloud recovery tool to get a later corrected factory recovery drive.  Or you can use a boot disk after the initial boot and go into c:\swsetup\app\mcafee\... and edit install.cmd to do a GOTO SKIP followed by adding a SKIP: label where the "passed" result is written to the log and effectively stop the crash in this botched app.  There is always a solution but its generally out of reach to the normal user unfortunately.

[Echo_Lake]

@GMorse
Thank you for posting on the HP Support Community.

To get the answer to this question, all it requires a blank USB drive (minimum 32 GB) into the computer and computer should be connected to the Internet.

I would request you to contact our Support and our Support Engineers should be able to sort this out. HP Support can be reached by clicking on the following link:  www.hp.com/contacthp/

Please feel free to contact us here anytime you need any further assistance. Please click “Accept as Solution” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.