HP Recovery Partition - Software needed?

You need either the Windows 10 install files or the Macrium Reflect Free rescue drive files to provide the boot files to make your recovery partition bootable. Now, you should be able to restart the computer into UEFI firmware:
UEFI Firmware Settings - Boot to from inside Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

The recovery partition should show up in the boot list. You still cannot recover the image created with Macrium Reflect, though, because that requires Macrium Reflect available when booting from the recovery partition. To get that, I would suggest you replace the Windows 10 Install boot.wim file in the \Sources folder with the boot.wim file from Kyhi's Recovery Tools.

Thanks for your patience.

1) I've now made a seperate drive (G) (Fat32) with the Original Win 10 Iso, and the boot.wim exchanged for the Kyhi's Tools.

In case of an accident I should be able to access this drive during startup, right? By choosing the disk in the list of bootable drives.

2) I've now made seperate drive (F) (Fat32) with the Macrium Reflect image of my current C:\ system.

To be able to install this image in case of my c:\ failures, I understand I need to copy the Macrium Reflect Free rescue drive files to the very same drive. Right?

Now, here's a little hint. On most UEFI systems, your bootable partition must be FAT32. A FAT32 recovery drive/partition has one drawback - it has a 2TB file size limit. If you create a single file backup image of your computer, it is going to be way over 2TB. So, you can either have a separate storage location formatted as NTFS (or NAS, which is usually Linux based) to hold the big single file. Or make sure your FAT32 partition is big enough to hold the image and if you use Macrium Reflect as your backup/restore, when you select the FAT32 partition to save the image to it will split the image into several consecutive files that will fit within the 2TB single file limit.

I always thought it was 2GB, not TB.

Berton said:

I always thought it was 2GB, not TB.

You are correct, brain fart on my part.

NavyLCDR said:

First, you really need to try booting into the recovery partition (G:) and make sure it boots before doing anything else.

Second, you need to make a Macrium Reflect image of both the EFI System Partition and the C: drive partition from the SSD if you did not do that the first time. In the event of failure you will need to restore both those partitions.

Third, the image can be stored anywhere that Kyhi's Recovery Tools can access. Just make the G: recovery partition large enough to hold it and put it there so you only have 1 "recovery partition". If you want an NTFS partition on your HDD for data storage (movies, music, documents, etc.), the Macrium Reflect image can be on it. I like it to be in my recovery partition.

Fourth, there is no need to do anything with a Macrium rescue drive separately if you have Kyhi's Recovery Tools that you can boot into. Kyhi's Recovery Tools has Macrium Reflect included.

You should have 1 "recovery" partition, G: drive. On my computer it contains:
The files and folders from the Windows 10 ISO file.
The boot.wim file from Kyhi's recovery tools (replacing the Windows 10 boot.wim file).
The exported drivers from the dism /export-driver command.
A Macrium Reflect image file of my entire SSD, which is the EFI System partition and the C: drive Windows partition.

This allows me the most flexibility. I can boot into Kyhi's Recovery Tools and have all the utilities available in it for troubleshooting. I can do a rapid SSD restore from the image file saved. I can do a completely clean install of Windows 10 from it. And I can do all that with no internet connection or any outside device so long as the internal HDD on my laptop is still good. On the road, if my SSD should fail, I could even set up the HDD as the main drive and either install or restore Windows 10 to it.

Sir, you have helped me greatly.

I can confirm that everything works the way I want it.

Great recovery software btw, it had lots of helpful software that loaded when I booted that 'disk'.

My image was done of the entire disk, all the partitions. I didn't load the image, but it should be working.

Once again, thanks ! Can travel safely without my USB disk.

NavyLCDR said:

You are correct, brain fart on my part.

Yeah, those seem to be happening to me more often.