Bootable disk? Recovery disk? What do I need?

megabyte said:

I forgot to get back to you. All went well except I forgot to test booting from the flash drive. Could you please give me the steps to do this? I am worried that I might make a mess of things, which would not be the first time!

First make sure you shut down Windows 10 completely. To do that, you hold down the shift key when you click on shutdown from the power icon on the start menu.

Insert the flash drive.

Press the power button.

At the first sign of life/computer logo there will be a key to press to enter the bios boot menu. It might be ESC, F2, F12, DEL, INS, some other function key. It depends upon your computer/motherboard. Press the right key and you should get a list of boot devices including the HDD, USB, DVD....

Select the USB and see if you get the menu the USB flash drive boots into. Kyhi's recovery drive will boot into Windows desktop. Once it all settles down at whatever menu you get, then you can hold the power key to turn off the computer and remove the flash drive to reboot normally.

Sorry this too so long.
After I clicked Esc, I chose the option HP Recovery. It took me to HP Recovery Manager wizard. Should I click continue or shutdown?

simrick said:

If you are trying to verify you can boot from your recovery media, then you need to get out of that HP program.

What you want is to press the appropriate key to get your one-time boot menu, so you can select to boot from the USB drive. It may be F2 on HP systems, I am not sure.

Rather than doing it wrong again, my options are:
System Info / System Diagnostics / HP Spare Key / Boot Device Options / BIOS Setup / HP Recovery / Network Boot

Yes, it works!!!

Thank you everyone so much for all of your help. I would be lost without you ...