I did find an image from a year ago I had on an external drive.
Tell us more about that! What kind of image? What program did you use to make it? Was it with Windows 7? If you made it before the switch to Win 10, wouldn't you rather use that?
So am I right in thinking that if I use the recovery USB and Image that should restore my computer to pre-incident?
No. Not if I understood correctly earlier that the USB was Win 10. Your USB is not a recovery
program. Or, at least I don't think so. I think it will only "recover" what is on the USB itself... Win 10. If you boot on it, it will probably prompt you to reinstall Win 10 (but there is a chance that it is an "image" such that it
may contain other software you installed, and it may have saved the Windows activation, etc). I'm curious what it is, exactly, but I don't know if you will choose to try it.
I also copied the recovery USB files onto the recovery(E: partition). Atanare since that was the way it was in the first place I'm betting the UEFI would be able to find it.
Again, no, not exactly (or I may again be misunderstanding). What it was in the first place in that partition was your Windows 7 recovery, set up by HP at the factory, but you formatted over that. I'm not sure when your USB files were put there, other that you said you just did that. Like the mystery with the USB stick, I'm curious about this whole deal, but I don't know if you will choose to try it, or not. If you think that UEFI will find it and boot it.... as if it were the original HP recovery.... then reboot the computer and hit the appropriate F-key (F11, F12, whatever... it should display the proper key to select for Recovery).... and see if it actually works. This is a serious step too though, so think about it. Your SYSTEM partition may call up the actual Recovery
program, so it may seem like it will work, but unless you actually tell it to keep going, you won't know if it will find the file(s) on the E: drive partition. Ah, and then... what are they? Win 7 or 10? Or would you put the old recovery image that you just found back in the E: drive?
But it is a decent chance that it will not boot into recovery with the F-key anyway, if it is not the original file(s) in the same structure as HP provided it. But maybe it will... who knows. Only trying these things will say for sure.
However what I hope to do now is copy the entire C: drive, partitions and all, onto the external hard drive. I think you mentioned this atanare, is there a way to do this? Then Ill go through the steps you stated above atan and should be there.
Yes, this can be done, and the video that Wiz provided is very accurate in that demo. But go slow here... I think you will have to deviate from the video. I thought I'd give it a test run today, and all went fine step-by-step until just beyond the part of selecting the source and target drives. I then encountered a FAILED report because my 4 TB external hard drive was too big for the MBR selections that were made by taking the default choices like in the video. It did still create some cloned partitions, in spite of the error, but the external hard drive was not bootable afterwards. And I did not try to restore the partitions by booting the CloneZilla CD again.
Let me also remind you that the video was truthful when it said,
"This will erase everything on the target drive!" I can confirm that (with only a test folder and a few files to see if they were deleted). I said earlier that I'm not a fan of making images like this, so I am not real familiar with this process myself. But it does seem like if it is successful that it will make a bootable hard drive that you can restore the partition images from. But this is a rather clumsy process, and like earlier warnings.... it is only as good as your ability to use the software later to recover those partitions. You should do some trials if possible to learn the ins and outs of how this works.
But wait... there's more. You will need to learn some extra steps and not use the defaults in the video for the same reason (sort of) that my attempt failed today. I have a BIOS computer, and so it uses MBR. But my failure was because 4 TB is not MBR compatible... and I needed GPT instead. Your computer is not BIOS, it is UEFI.... and so you need GPT right off the bat for that reason. I hope this makes sense to you. Too much alphabet soup!


But what I'm getting at is that I think you will need to explore the CloneZilla options to choose the proper settings for UEFI and GPT in order to get a good recovery on your hard drive. A hard drive is kind of an expensive item to dedicate for this, so you may change your mind here.
I will do more experiments to help, but I'll be severely limited for the next 4 or 5 days due to work again. I have a UEFI laptop that I can use next time, and I can even put Windows back on it if needed, or I can just try CloneZilla with the Linux partitions that it has and try to document the steps for UEFI/GPT cloning if you still want to proceed with this.
Sorry again for length... I wish I could be more concise!
Cheers