I’ve recently acquired an old HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3 and wanted to reset that to the factory state. Luckily, this already supports HP’s Cloud Recovery feature where you can download the recovery image from the Internet and write it to a USB drive. There’s even a choice between Windows 7 and Windows 10.
However, this is an ancient version of Windows 10 from 2016 and it will be written onto the USB to an NTFS partition as the install.wim file is 4.2 GB and thus larger than the maximum allowed 4.0 GB on a FAT32 partition.
But, for some reason, this laptop – even with the latest available BIOS – is not able to do an EFI boot from NTFS. Only when you enable Legacy support (aka. “CSM” – Compatibility Support Module), you can boot from this NTFS-formatted recovery USB. The big problem there, however, is Windows outright refusing to install onto a GPT-formatted drive and demands an MBR one. There doesn’t seem to be a way around this, apart from booting the Windows installer via EFI.
So, to fix this, I’ve taken another USB drive, formatted it as FAT32 and copied everything over – apart from the install.wim file – which File Explorer had me skip anyways.
Then, I needed to split the actual install image into smaller pieces. Luckily, Microsoft provides the DISM tool for that: Deployment Image Servicing and Management. With F: being the NTFS and G: being the FAT32 USB, the actual command to run was:
DISM /Split-Image /ImageFile:F:\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:G:\sources\install.swm /FileSize:4000This created the files install.swm (4.0 GB) and install2.swm (180 MB) on the FAT32 device.
Once this was done, I was able to set the BIOS back to UEFI mode and boot from the FAT32 USB drive to install the original Windows 10 (2016) onto the GPT-partitioned SSD.
On a side note: This recovery image didn’t include any of the usual bloatware. So, instead of faffing around like me, you’re probably better off taking an up-to-date Windows 10 installer instead. It also appears as if a specific HP_TOOLS partition isn’t necessary anymore but the HP Tools and BIOS Updates can go onto the main EFI partition instead. Same for the HP Recovery partition – you can probably remove that as it’s the same outdated Windows 10 version that you can download via Cloud Recovery.