SOLVED Recovery Drive Won't Boot

[Jerry52]

Hi, I have a HP Pavilion g6 laptop that was factory supplied with Windows 8 and uses UEFI. I have now done a clean install of Windows 10 - 1511. If I create a System Repair Disk (CD) the laptop will boot from it, and in the boot menu it shows as UEFI. If I create a Recovery Drive (USB) the laptop won't enter the boot menu, and so can't boot from it, but my non UEFI desktop will boot from it. If I use Macrium Reflect to create a recovery USB drive the laptop will boot from that OK. So it seems that Windows is creating the wrong type of drive.

 

[Trouble]

Try formatting the USB ThumbDrive as a FAT32 volume in advance of pointing the Recovery Drive Utility at it and see if that produces a recovery drive that will boot your UEFI system.

 

[Saltgrass]

It would be good to see some indication of your system configuration, When you did a clean install, you may have changed that. But to be honest, a Recovery Drive which needs to be 16 GB if you copy system files, should create the correct type of drive. But it does sound like the drive is not allowing the correct boot mode.

Did you make any changes to your bios settings when you installed Windows 10?

 

[Jerry52]

It would be good to see some indication of your system configuration, When you did a clean install, you may have changed that. But to be honest, a Recovery Drive which needs to be 16 GB if you copy system files, should create the correct type of drive. But it does sound like the drive is not allowing the correct boot mode.

Did you make any changes to your bios settings when you installed Windows 10?

 

[Jerry52]

Thanks for your replies, you got me thinking... I took the drive that I had created using Macrium Reflect, that would boot the laptop, I used DiskPart to "Clean" the drive, and then created a Recovery Drive using that one, and it worked! Now I did some more testing using 3 different brands of drives, I'll call them A. B, and C. I have 2 each of A and C, and tested both of them, so 5 drives in total. Each drive was "Cleaned" before testing, and each drive was tested using Windows Recovery Drive, and Macrium Reflect - both creation methods gave the same result. Drive A (the original drive) locks the laptop up when you try to go into the boot menu, drive B works OK, drive C doesn't register in the boot menu. All drives will boot a legacy desktop PC (and show in the boot menu). When I used the desktop PC to create a Windows Recovery Drive using drive B, this would also boot the laptop. So it would seem that not all ThumbDrives are created equal, and given that I tested 2 different samples of the faulty ones, and got the same result, you couldn't say that it was a faulty drive. Drive A = 4GB, B=2GB, C=2GB.
Note: The Laptop's BIOS settings are on the factory default.