Looking for advice on how to try and recover a Windows 10 laptop. 👍

My daughter has an HP Altec laptop with a 1Tb hard drive. Over the years she has slowly filled the hard drive with horse videos and photos until the drive was about 96% full. As you might expect the operation of the laptop was sloooooow.

Last week when switching it off, the message "Installing Windows update" appeared and the laptop seemed to be downloading something. After about 5 minutes it announced that the windows update had 'failed' and that it was undoing the update. After a short while the laptop shutdown, and that was the last time it ever worked.

When switching on, it displays the HP logo for awhile then that is replaced by a ring of rotating dots. After nearly 5 minutes the dots stop rotating and nothing further happens.

In an effort to try and give the laptop half a chance to recover, I removed the hard drive and copied all of my daughters files to a second drive. Then I deleted the videos and photos etc. from the laptop drive. This leaves it with about 65% free space on the hard drive.

After reinstalling the drive in the HP laptop, there was no change and the laptop still fails to boot. The the drive does have a HP recovery partition but I seem unable to find anyway to get the laptop to boot from that. When powering up, pressing F11 gets the screen to show very briefly the message ".......System Recovery" but then nothing further happens and we are back to the rotating ring of small dots for another 5 minutes before it just freezes.

Looking for advice and help on what, (if anything) can be done to recover from this.

Can I create some bootable windows 10 USB ?

Anyone have any thoughts on how to create a USB recovery for Windows 10 ?

52 minutes ago, unofix said:

Anyone have any thoughts on how to create a USB recovery for Windows 10 ?

I use to know how to make a recovery disc on Windows 3.1 (on a floppy disc), but that's way above me. I'm sure someone will be able to advise, sounds a really irritating fault...

26 minutes ago, StephenFord said:

I use to know how to make a recovery disc on Windows 3.1 (on a floppy disc)

Lol, me too but that was the height of my IT achievement and it was about 30 years ago!😀

Apologies Unofix, we're not helping!

google should tell you, failing that back it up wipe it and reinstall fresh. if you have the product code reinstalling the same version then entering the code will work.

here you go:

https://www.easeus.com/backup-recovery/create-a-windows-10-recovery-drive-for-another-computer.html#:~:text=You are able to create,USB hard drive creation tool.

 

12 hours ago, froggy8 said:

here you go:

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it does what many other links do, which is go round in circles before eventually pointing you to the Microsoft site. This expects that you (a) have the Windows 10 licence number, which I don't know because it came pre-installed. (b) that you are using the machine that you want to make the recovery for ?????? (c) that you might be using another machine to make the recovery (which I am) but the Microsoft recovery tool fails to open and gives the message "We don't know why it failed to run" followed be an error code. Perhaps its because I'm using a windows 7 machine.

What should be a simple task has so far taken over a week and I'm still no further forward 🙁

7 minutes ago, unofix said:

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it does what many other links do, which is go round in circles before eventually pointing you to the Microsoft site. This expects that you (a) have the Windows 10 licence number, which I don't know because it came pre-installed. (b) that you are using the machine that you want to make the recovery for ?????? (c) that you might be using another machine to make the recovery (which I am) but the Microsoft recovery tool fails to open and gives the message "We don't know why it failed to run" followed be an error code. Perhaps its because I'm using a windows 7 machine.

What should be a simple task has so far taken over a week and I'm still no further forward 🙁

You can find out the product key using registry editor, here is another link.

https://www.avg.com/en/signal/find-windows-10-product-key

4 minutes ago, froggy8 said:

You can find out the product key using registry editor, here is another link.

That would work, But the windows 10 machine won't boot so can't get to run anything.

you can download win 10 from microshaft without the key, then insert after, the key should also be in her online microshaft account. Use the USB option

 

Il have a good read on your first post when I get home then see what other ideas I have got.

I have installed many windows 10 on windows 7 machine without any problems 

can you get into bios at all?

im guessing you already know how to get into bios but just incase, when you retsart or switch the laptop on, keep pressing f10 and that should get you into bios then look for any item named Boot, boot option or similar then change boot sequence to put usb flash drive int he first place. save and exit.

i am hoping you have a spare pc or laptop to create the recovery usb.

if you have then download the MediaCreationTool21H1, plug one of your usb, personally i would use at least 8gb. once you have put the usb in then open up the MediaCreationTool21H1 and follow the instructions. once you have done that then plug that usb in your faulty laptop and switch on.

hopefully that will work 🙂