Cloned HP_Recovery partition wont boot

Thanks
I'll certainly give that a try too.

After a short nights sleep, dreaming about partitions and cloning m, I had a couple of thoughts.

1). am mostly booting and imaging from a WinPE USB boot stick.
The 'Tutorial' I initially followed specified booting from Win 7 disk and getting to CMD prompt from Win7 Setup Repair option. Is this causing an issue?

2). When using imageX from the WinPE USB boot, I am using a version of imageX from Win AIK download. If I boot from Win 7 instal disk, I have been using imagex32.exe from a different standalone source, and typing the full "IMAGEX32.EXE".
So different ImageX executables. Not yet checked to see if they are different versions. If they were, could that be an issue?


3). Have been so fixated in getting F11 Recovery Boot option to work, have not yet tried the 'obvious ' solution....Create a win image of the working C:\ Win7 installation and restore that to my target drive. Not sure how IMAGEX is affected ( if at all) by partition size. The 'c:\' will be going from 580gb down to 120.


4). For F11 factory restore to work (boot) , maybe it is relying on there already being something on the c:\. volume???

Christmas Day, not sure I'll do any work on this today.

Happy Christmas to you all

SIW2 said:

What is on the recovery partition?

You need to add the bootable wim file to bcd. It is probably called boot.wim. (Might be called winre.wim )

It may be in a folder on the recov partition, "sources" folder is likely.

You can do it with easybcd, use the WINPE tab and browse to boot.wim on the recov partition.

That should give you an entry on the boot menu. When you have done that, we can have a look at assigning a scancode (e.g. f11)

Well here I am again could not let it go.
Really sorry for wasting your time and not fully reading and UNDERSTANDING & DIGESTING the contents of your first post.

Yes, there was a winre.wim file down within the file structure. Despite what you said, I was thinking 'boot info...must be in root of drive'. There was a file in root labelled hpwinre with no .dot extension


Have not tackled CMD line editing of BCD, but once I had a bootable Win7 GUI from the 'partial-no drivers' install off the HPFactory.wim, I was able to run EasyBCD, add the winre.wim to the BCD.

As you stated, I had to select it from the boot list,
Running the install now

So next step is to assign the F11 scan code.

I promise I'll read your post more carefully in future, I guess I was tired and suffering 'tunnel vision'

Thanks once more.

hi, I have also same problem i cant access my partition either pressing f11 during boot up.I have Hp 4530s once i restored my os with windows recovery method unfortunately it wipes all my hdd, thanks god i saved my image in external drive for redundancy now i restored back. My question is how did you done F11 recovery that would restore your factory image? Can give more details specifically.. please help me i m not familiar advance level of repairing Thanks in advance

SIW2 said:

Gimagex is easier, does the same thing with a gui. Great free tool from John Bennett. Comes in both bit versions, so you can chuck it into winpe.

GImageX - AutoItScript

Interestingly Gimagex fails on creating the image of the HP_Recovery partition..it fails at 99% when imaging the winre.wim file image within the partition

imagex from command line works fine though

Thanks Neil for your response.. With windows image backup i have restored my C drive that is "2, Windows Partition,NTFS, largest available space." with old data.But remaining HP partition is completely wiped,its good thing i have imaged HP_Recovery partition and restored back "HP_Recovery NTFS. 18.6Gb. NTFS".Now the disgusting thing is i have lost -" HP_Tools FAT32, 5Gb" i m planning to copy this drive with my friend having same model next i will proceed to your recent replied method