Keep HP recovery after upgrade to W10.

[leandronb]

Hi guys.
My brother gave me his laptop to fix some problems he was having.
The laptop was unusable and I used hp recovery to restore to factory state.
Is in windows 7 right now and I want to upgrade to w10. he uses some programs to work made by a company called totvs, in their site the software is w10 compatible but these work programs may be a pain when not used a certain platform.
So I want to upgrade to Windows 10 and if he goes to work and program do not work I just use the recovery tool to reset to Windows 7.
But I read that the recovery partition may be lost in the process.
So is there a way to keep this partition intact so I can use it when I need?
I can use this partition without entering windows, using f8 and selecting repair computer, the last option is recovery tool by hp. The software is probably in recovery partition but who knows, maybe to access this menu you have to have the stock OS.
Thanks in advance.

 

[utroz]

Make a backup image of the hard drive (programs that let you clone can usually make a backup file as well) and then all you will have to do is gost the hard drive image file back onto the laptops hard drive if windows 10 messes everything up and the best part is you won't have to reinstall everything..

 

[leandronb]

What would be a good software to do this?
I read a little about this and some people were no so successful after doing this, key combination do not worked to enter the recovery.
It was a dell, maybe hp is simpler, I am afraid to damage the MBR and lose the partition. Happened once with a dell laptop but II had luck and fixed just with the files on partition.

 

[utroz]

For free software this one seems to work http/www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
If you make a image of your entire main hard drive it will have all your partitions and MBR so no worries about windows keys ect.. Your backup will need to be on another data drive that is big enough to handle all your files, so on a laptop a usb external drive is probably the easiest way but you can also use a network shared drive from another computer. OR you could take the hard drive out of the laptop and put it in a desktop (as a secondary drive don't try to boot off it) and then save the image to the desktops hard drive/s.
Other ways here: http/www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

 

[leandronb]

Thanks man, I did this and got to the part of restore just for test but I didn't proceed.
Saved on an external hard drive.
Now is running Windows 10. I hope I don't have to restore this image because is running so much better than windows 7.
Thanks for the help.

 

[utroz]

Glad you system is running better..