Factory MFT on a brand new HP Windows 10?

I'm really curious, if you just wanted to image the hard drive and then wipe it and install some other OS, why did you even boot the computer from the hard drive to begin with? Why not just boot from a Macrium rescue disk or Kyhi's recovery drive and image the hard drive from that without every having booted from the hard drive until the image was made?

That's what I did with the last tablet I purchased because it came with Windows 8.1 and I knew there was 99% chance it was Windows with Bing that you can't download anywhere. And I was right. Then I exported the drivers and upgraded it to Windows 10.

You had a good idea there, but with UEFI you can't boot from external media by default, at least not on that system or others I've encountered. Plus, the media I have with Macrium won't boot in UEFI mode.

I should have spent some time looking into creating a UEFI boot disk for Macrium, that would have save the hassle of disassembling / reassembling the system to pull the hard drive.

It seems it's gonna take some years before we see any standardization of these UEFI firmware implementations. HP's really sucks, and you really have to fiddle fart around to do something simple like change the boot order. It's easy if you have a working Windows OS, not so much if you don't.

In my case I didn't want to wipe the disk of Windows completely, in case I decide to return the system I'll want to restore the factory drive image. So I just resized the Windows partition and installed Linux an the freed space. That also left the boot manager in control. I got it worked out finally. Next time I do this it should be much easier.