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Need help repairing Vista Home OS on a laptop
- Thread starter hewho
- Start date
Has he nuked the recovery partition? Cause if that's still there he doesn't need actual recovery disks. A special keypress at power up (Is it F2?) accesses the recovery options and allows the laptop to be restored to factory-shipped state.
Joe Average
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Those keypress things typically only function when the original bootloader is still in place, as well as the MBR from the factory. Once those have been wiped - or damaged, as the case may be - those function key triggers are usually removed in the process and inaccessible. I had an Acer laptop about a year ago that had that happen. The owner had tried to start over again and instead of using the factory restore discs, he wanted to use a regular XP Home disc, and in the process he wiped the factory MBR/bootloader which rendered the F12 keypress to do a factory restore off the restore partition null and void.
However... after spending several hours doing a shitload of research, I was able to track down an ISO of a custom made bootloader repair tool - created by Acer itself - that used the SLAX modular OS concept just to boot into a "live" environment that did a restore from the factory partition. The weird thing was the Acer restore discs wouldn't do that - if you used them they would restore everything by wiping out the restore partition as well as the user partition - it would not start the restore from the restore partition. Doing so would have cost the owner everything on the drive and the cost of the data recovery job would have basically bought him a new laptop.
So, just for the record: while there are some laptops and even desktops where the actual factory restoration from a recovery partition might be tied to something in the BIOS (some ThinkPads are like this), the basic fact is that most of them are accessed by the keypress trigger which is recognized by a piece of code that executes from the bootloader. If that gets wiped out, the "Press <insert key here> to being factory restore..." or whatever method is available will more than likely not work.
Hope this helps...
However... after spending several hours doing a shitload of research, I was able to track down an ISO of a custom made bootloader repair tool - created by Acer itself - that used the SLAX modular OS concept just to boot into a "live" environment that did a restore from the factory partition. The weird thing was the Acer restore discs wouldn't do that - if you used them they would restore everything by wiping out the restore partition as well as the user partition - it would not start the restore from the restore partition. Doing so would have cost the owner everything on the drive and the cost of the data recovery job would have basically bought him a new laptop.
So, just for the record: while there are some laptops and even desktops where the actual factory restoration from a recovery partition might be tied to something in the BIOS (some ThinkPads are like this), the basic fact is that most of them are accessed by the keypress trigger which is recognized by a piece of code that executes from the bootloader. If that gets wiped out, the "Press <insert key here> to being factory restore..." or whatever method is available will more than likely not work.
Hope this helps...
Yeah, does Joe Average. Clarifies quite a few things, and apologies to the topic poster.
Makes it doubly desirable to effect a repair rather than a reinstall too, in this circumstance. Inability to access the startup options won't matter as much if access is regained to the 'Create Recovery Disks' tool is regained within Windows.
All in all, though, it just underscores the need to create that recovery disk set as soon as you get the laptop, and to keep data safely backed up elsewhere afterwards. NOTHING beats those simple procedures
Makes it doubly desirable to effect a repair rather than a reinstall too, in this circumstance. Inability to access the startup options won't matter as much if access is regained to the 'Create Recovery Disks' tool is regained within Windows.
All in all, though, it just underscores the need to create that recovery disk set as soon as you get the laptop, and to keep data safely backed up elsewhere afterwards. NOTHING beats those simple procedures
The "Recovery" option is still on the boot menu.
When booted with that option, there is about 10 min of drive activity with a blank screen,
then the mouse pointer appears, follow by another 5 min of drive activity.
After that, nothing but the blank screw and thew mouse pointer.
The mouse pointer does work.
When booted with that option, there is about 10 min of drive activity with a blank screen,
then the mouse pointer appears, follow by another 5 min of drive activity.
After that, nothing but the blank screw and thew mouse pointer.
The mouse pointer does work.
Worked on this puter some more this morning.
Can't get to the eRecorvery menu anymore.
Instead, I am getting:
File:\Boot\BCD
Status:0xc000000f
Info: Error while attempting to read the boot configuration.
Did the boot sector has gone bad?
Removed the drive from the laptop and hooked it up to my desktop.
Chkdisk went OK, no errors.
I can read both the Acer and Data partitions in Explorer.
But Partition Magic 8 reported the drive being bad.
I'll Ghost the drive before I monkey with it more.
Can't get to the eRecorvery menu anymore.
Instead, I am getting:
File:\Boot\BCD
Status:0xc000000f
Info: Error while attempting to read the boot configuration.
Did the boot sector has gone bad?
Removed the drive from the laptop and hooked it up to my desktop.
Chkdisk went OK, no errors.
I can read both the Acer and Data partitions in Explorer.
But Partition Magic 8 reported the drive being bad.
I'll Ghost the drive before I monkey with it more.