Windows 7: HP Recovery still runs from F11 after clean reinstalling to C

There seems to be a change in HP's over the past few years so that if you clean reinstall from boot to C and leave the 199mb System Reserved Partition, Recovery and HP TOols partitions intact, you can later run Full Factory Recovery or Minimized OS Image Recovery by booting F11.

Previously if you deleted, formatted, wiped or just clean reinstalled to C it was iffy whether F11 Factory Recovery would later boot to run.

It's still a good idea to make your Factory Recovery disk set, but if you have room to let those three partitions remain you have a more stable Factory Recovery method if you might ever need it via F11 at boot.



HP Backup and Recovery Manager
HP Recov DIsks - make another set
Reinstalling Windows 7


Edit: The Minimized OS Image Recovery option also is about as close to clean reinstall as you can get using Factory Recovery, with only the HP Support Assistant, Recovery Manager and Wireless Assistant reimaging with Windows 7.

Good to know will probably save me some headache in the near future.

Greg,

prior to the availability of the System Reserved partition OEM bootstrap additions for recovery options were by default placed on the primary boot partition (C: ). When this was replaced by a re-install the additions were lost.

Now that the boot files are placed on the System Reserved partition this is a lot more robust against a format of C:,

As the bootstrap was merely a pointer to the recovery partition boot files you can often force a restore on a system that has had the bootstrap files removed from the C: partition, by setting the active drive to the recovery partition itself. This has saved me on more than one occasion

Thanks Nigel, informative.

I wonder why more OEM's don't organize this like HP has with a hotkey other than F8, since Factory Recovery when it is listed on F8>Advanced Boot Options>Repair My Computer seems to disappear during a clean reinstall to C.

Also I wonder if F8>Repair My Computer>Factory Recovery would remain intact if Sys Reserved is similarly preserved for reinstall to C, kept Active so that it refreshes and remains System partition.

Will have to test it.

Greg,

The system Reserved partition has only been available to the OEM suppliers since the arrival of Windows 7 so it is still very new in the minds of these large multinationals It may well be that now that the more adventurous companies such as HP have started using it correctly it will become the norm. I hope so as this does make things a lot easier

Additional

I have noticed that Acronis now automatically backs up any system reserved partition it finds as part of the One Click backup strategy, so things are progressing

Thanks. I've made a mental note of this for future reference.

Perhaps now Method Two of this will get serious attention / consideration now.

Partition / Extended : Logical Drives

Cleaning up a HP PC.

Bill2's post

Yes, Ray, I included HP Minimized Image Recovery which Bill referred to an hour ago in my OP 15 hours ago.

After reading this informative thread, I determined that not all HP models contain the Recovery Manager allowing creation of the Factory Recovery disk set. My ProBook doesn't & I called HP who confirmed this fact. Since the computer is still under factory warranty, I was able to order a disk set for free. Be sure the CS rep orders the right set, they ordered 32-bit instead of 64-bit, had to call back & start over. The HP disk sets have different part numbers, unlike a full install from Microsoft where both 32 & 64 bit versions are included in one package.

BTW, the BIOS access has changed somewhat, you can go directly to F11 for Recovery or ESC takes you to a menu of options, F11 being one of the options. ESC shows on the opening screen lower left corner, after power-on. The DVD/CD-ROM drive is now referred to the "Notebook Upgrade Bay". I figured this out when attempting to determine why a CD would not boot. You can add a timed delay for the boot order.