f11 system recovery hp windows 10 not working

I really want to use the recovery partition image because it will have all the right drivers installed.

But GPT doesn't support or use active partitions. If this were an MBR disk I'd use diskpart to make the recovery partition active and reboot. I'm guessing that Windows 10 has overwritten the boot files and lost the F11 recovery partition option. My problem is that the recovery partition is there but pressing F11 won't boot it and the HP Recovery Management software was not installed or retained during the Windows 10 upgrade. He didn't make recovery disks when he got the notebook so all we have is the recovery partition on disk. I'm now wondering whether it might be a card fault, so I want to go back to the Windows 8 system that was pre-installed via a factory reset to see whether it all works with Windows 8. I've done all the obvious (reinstalled drivers etc.) and refreshed Windows 10. He claims it was working ok immediately after the upgrade, of course he's 'done nothing' and it's just stopped working (where have we heard that before?). He upgraded from Windows 8 (pre-installed) to Windows 10 and his wireless card isn't connecting.

F11 system recovery hp windows 10 not working