HP Recovery - Restoration incomplete SOLUTION / FIX!!!

[JanTroll]

Have you tried restoring your older HP laptop, but got stuck at "Restoration incomplete" screen?
"Restoration incomplete"
(Sorry, my laptop came from Poland, so language on the photos is Polish.)

Well, there's a fix you can try! 😉

Some HP laptops from 2016-2019 came with one-year free McAfee MLS subscription. There is strange bug - if the date set on the computer is later than 2018, the McAfee MLS installation fails (possibly because the license expired), causing the HP Recovery manager to crash and display "Recovery incomplete" screen.

The workaround of this issue is to temporally set computer's clock to the year 2018.

In order to do this, first you need to shut down your computer completely. You can do this by pressing the power button for 5 seconds while it is turned on, or hold down the SHIFT key when clicking "Shut down" in Windows.

Then, you need to press the power button to turn on the laptop and immediately start pressing F10 key - after doing this, you will enter BIOS Setup.

BIOS Setup

Use the down arrow to navigate to the date option and change it's value by pressing F5 or F6 keys. You can switch between month, day and year fields by pressing Enter. (I changed it to 12/22/2018.) Be careful and don't mess with other settings if you don't know what they are doing! When you are done changing date, press F10 to save changes.

Now get straight to the system recovery. When you boot back into Windows, it will automatically correct the date and you will need to do everything again.

As you can see, for me it worked and finally the "Recovery is complete" screen appeared. 😀

"Recovery is complete"

After successful recovery, you can go back to BIOS Setup to correct the date.

If that did not fix the problem, you can try changing the date to the day laptop was originally manufactured and McAfee license was still valid.

By the way, you should uninstall this McAfee MLS software anyway, because the one year subscription expired, and now all it does is just slowing down your laptop.

Hope it will help you too. 😉