basic OS on wrong drive?

[Anthony__--]

tried Ubuntu few days ago. It wouldn't recognise network adapter, so tried unsuccessfully to uninstall,  partitions messed.  Knowhow showed me how to use Media Creation Tool to re-install partitions and Windows etc.  But since doing that, booting up is really snail slow.  Is it possible that I directed installation to mechanical hard drive, instead of to SSD?  How can I tell on which drive OS is sitting?  Suggestions please!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Your notebook should be supported by the HP cloud recovery tool.

If your PC is not working, use another Windows PC with W7 64 bit or newer and a 32 GB USB flash drive, to make a bootable USB recovery drive that will reinstall W10, the drivers and the software that originally came with your PC.

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

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

You can check if your PC is supported by the cloud recovery tool at the link  below...

http://support.hp.cloud-recovery.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/

[Anthony__--]

Downloaded HP Cloud recovery on USB

Followed all simple instructions on HP video

No files to save

Factory reset seemed to be happening.

all the right progress bars completed and ticked

But when finished, up popped my old desktop - with no changes made!

Tried the whole process 3 times.

Is there a way to forcefully make it happen?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, I have no idea why that happened.

Since you know you can clean install W10, the only suggestion I can think of would be to try this...

Boot from the plain W10 installation media you made, when you get to the part of the installation process where it asks 'Where do you want to install Windows,' delete every partition on both drives, leaving them both with one partition of unallocated space.

Then exit out of the installation, shut down the PC and try the cloud recovery tool again.

With absolutely nothing on either drive, hopefully it will work as designed.

I have only used the tool on a HP 255 G7 notebook with a single M.2 SSD.

It had a plain installation of W10 on it, but when I ran the tool, it did work as expected.

If you have to go back to clean installing W10, make sure you install it on the smaller of the two disks.

The smaller one is the 256 GB NVMe SSD.