HP Stream 14 - Windows 10 Woes and Reinstall

Windows 10, love it or hate it it's hard to avoid using it.

I'm now having to support my Son's .HP Stream 14 laptop - mainly for him to do his homework on (yeah, right)..

It's not a bad little laptop, no powerhouse to be certain, but for browsing and connecting to the school resources it does exactly what we wanted.

Or at least it did until a couple of days ago - when Windows decided it was no longer going to let anyone log in.  The problem was probably a corrupt user profile - unfortunately my Son, in an unusual display of self reliance tried to fix it himself by following some youtube videos.

To cut a long story short - oh dear.

I'm not that bothered that he tried to fix this himself - but I'd rather that he'd asked for a bit of help once he got to the point of trying to do a system restore.

Windows has a few tricks to get you out of situtations like this.

You can use a system rollback - these had been disabled.

You can do a system refresh, keeping your files and apps in place.  This didn't work - it just gave an error message to the effect that it couldn't do it.

You can do a full wipe, which removes everything but puts it back to a "just installed" state.  This didn't work either.

HP also provide a "restore to factory settings" option.  Guess what?  It didn't work.

One Google search later and the "recommended" next step on the HP forums according to their "experts" is to buy the recovery media on USB stick (or DVD) directly from HP.  So I checked...

£35 plus postage.

To quote Winston Churchill "Fuck that for a game of soldiers."

Before we move on, I'd like to make it clear that anything that you decide to do based on this blog post you do at your own risk.  If your laptop ends up unbootable, explodes, eats the cat, makes obscene phone calls to your Grandmother or whatever it's your problem, not mine.

So, for the cheapskates amongst us, what next?

In my case, I popped onto Amazon and bought a fresh 32GB usb key on next day delivery (thank you Amazon Prime).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01M8NNMHO/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Then, I followed the instructions here to create a Windows 10 USB install (you'll need  access to a working PC to do this).

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/2376-create-bootable-usb-flash-drive-install-windows-10-a.html

And then I booted from the USB key (I did this from safe mode, but you can get the boot options by pressing ESC repeatedly on startup).

I ended up having to format the existing Windows partition and then re-installing onto there.  After that it's a case of confirming the install language, crossing your fingers and waiting half an hour (or so) whilst it installs.

And that's pretty much it.

The correct drivers for sound, WiFi and the onboard graphics were installed, I was able to create a local administrator account for me, and then connected my Son's own Microsoft account - and...

It worked.  One plain Windows 10 install, correct drivers and no crapware.


For me, this was a big success, and TBH if you've already got a USB key at least 4GB in size kicking around you can do this legally for nothing apart from a couple of hours of your time.

Worst comes to the worst if it hadn't worked I'd not have been much worse off and could still have bought a restore thingy from HP, however, at the prices they're asking it paid to try the "hard" way first.