HP’s Windows recovery installation seems to be a little bit broken. Or at least for me it was. While restoring the Windows 7 on an HP Elitebook 8540w I ran into some issues when the drivers installed. The system just stalled and nothing was moving anymore. After a reboot I saw this nice error message:
The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error
Well, not nice at all, but there is a way you can continue from here. Here are the steps:
- On that very same screen press SHIFT-F10 and a command prompt should appear.
- Enter “regedit” (without the quotes) into the command prompt and press enter.
- In the registry editor navigate to HKLM/SYSTEM/SETUP/STATUS/ChildCompletion
- Double click on the entry setup.exe and change the value from 1 to 3.
- Close the registry editor.
- Click OK in the error window, which will restart your machine.
After these steps you should be able to continue with your Windows setup. In my case I had some trouble getting all drivers to work, but that is a different story.