Asus Preload Recovery boot loop

[sorcerer]

Never seen this before so completely stumped here. It's an Asus X501A laptop running Windows 7 (Home Premium I think) and on power-up it shows a black screen with the wording "Windows is loading files" and then opens up a command prompt and starts to automatically load the "Asus Preload Recovery Wizard", which looks as though it'll do a factory reset if you let it.

Of course, I don't want it to do that so I hit the Cancel button, which throws up a BCDedit.exe window (during which time no keyboard input is accepted) and finally a wpeutil.exe window flashes up momentarily before rebooting and doing the same thing all over again as you can see on this short video here

Like I said, I've never seen this before so any and all help to fix this gratefully received, thanks.

EDIT: Sorry, should have said that the customer said it was working perfectly on Sunday night and had been using it for a couple of hours. She shut it down to go to bed, came to switch it back on on Monday morning and it was like this, so no obvious cause as far as she knows - or is telling, anyway.

 

[lcoughey]

Get a full clone of the hard drive, assuming that you don't want to lose the data on it, then test it, if it isn't already obvious that it is failing.

 

[sorcerer]

Thanks for that, will do.

 

[HFultzjr]

Clone...clone ....clone!
Make sure the data is safe!
Then proceed to find out the issue.

 

[sorcerer]

Get a full clone of the hard drive, assuming that you don't want to lose the data on it, then test it, if it isn't already obvious that it is failing.

Clone...clone ....clone!
Make sure the data is safe!
Then proceed to find out the issue.

Good advice and I usually do - I was already in the process when Mr Coughey up there suggested it. I initially fired up the laptop, watched it go through two reboots and thought, nah, no idea about this, so I allowed it to do a third reboot to video it, then started on the clone - which, of course I should have done first but feeling a bit pigged off today and not thinking at my best.

Anyway, it's just completed a GSmartControl extended test without any errors and no attributes are flagged in red, so it's cloned and it's tested ok, what can I do now?

 

[glennd]

Boot to a recovery console and run sfc/scannow and chdsk

 

[sorcerer]

Boot to a recovery console and run sfc/scannow and chdsk

Thanks Glenn, will do

 

[HFultzjr]

Boot to a Win 7 repair disk and run some startup/bootup repairs.

 

[CLC]

---------> This!

Get a full clone of the hard drive, assuming that you don't want to lose the data on it, then test it, if it isn't already obvious that it is failing.

Every computer that comes into my shop gets booted up with Parted Magic and I run GSmartControl with a short test. It takes little time and after you get into the habit and it's surely saved my butt a few times when I was ready to pop in an av rescue disk to do a full scan on a bad hard drive.

 

[sorcerer]

Well I've tried every boot repair option I can think of and no joy at all. Time to get the customer's data off and nuke the darn thing I think, sadly.

 

[sorcerer]

Again, I have no clue because I've not come across a problem like this before but someone suggested using bcdedit.exe to edit the boot loader. I've not used this before so can anyone see the problem here and, more importantly, help me fix it. This is the last attempt before I nuke it.

 

[Bootman 650]

Had a similar situation with a HP not so long back which I posted about. The general consensus then was just to nuke and pave rather than waste time trying every repair under the sun to no avail. I hate n+p myself but on these occasions you just need to draw a line under it and move on.

 

[sorcerer]

Thanks Bootman, that's what will happen later today if I don't get any other suggestions. Well, either that or it's going in the pond!

 

[CLC]

Did you happen to check which partition is active, I should have mentioned that earlier.

 

[sorcerer]

Did you happen to check which partition is active, I should have mentioned that earlier.

Well according to this pic it would appear to be partition 1 but the video seems to show all of them becoming the "selected" partition at some point. As my mate would say, "It's doin' me cabbage in" and I've lost it with this problem now. By the way, the 'unallocated' portion is because I'm working on my clone drive, not the original.

 

[NJW]

Reset BIOS to optimised defaults? Toggle SATA mode ATA/AHCI?

I just had a Win7 in a boot loop, getting as far as the start of the Windows animation splash. Turned out the SATA mode had flipped after a power outage. Weird? Yes! 99.9% confident that the client hadn't touched it.

 

[CLC]

Mark the OS partition as active and see what happens. Then if it doesn't boot, pop in a win 7 disk and just let it do the auto repairs, it's usually good for boot issues, that's about it.

 

[sorcerer]

Reset BIOS to optimised defaults? Toggle SATA mode ATA/AHCI?

Thanks Nick but already tried both those and no joy.

Mark the OS partition as active and see what happens. Then if it doesn't boot, pop in a win 7 disk and just let it do the auto repairs, it's usually good for boot issues, that's about it.

Thanks, will give it a go.

EDIT: Well, tried everything and still no go so sadly it's N&P time. Cheers anyway guys.

 

[sorcerer]

Ok, this is getting weirder. To bypass Windows permissions issues I'll often do a customer's data transfer in Linux and it's always worked fine.

On this picture you can clearly see that five partitions are visible to Parted Magic:

However, when mounted in Linux (and I've tried both Ubuntu and Mint, just to be sure), the OS is missing. I've obscured three partitions in red, not because there's anything secret but just because they're mine and to highlight that the three others are the customer's drive - the customer's OS partition is missing so how do I get at their data to save it before nuking the drive? Man, this job is just doing my trolley in!!!

 

[NJW]

the customer's OS partition is missing

??? sda3 is where Windows should be. The fact that it contains only 2.15 GiB suggests that the restore procedure was started and aborted (manually). In other words, the system is borked. Don't ask me how I know this – the Asus recovery options are not intuitive (to me, anyway).

sda2 is a dummy partition, afaik, which is used by Windows, just in case (dynamic/basic disk? Not sure.). It isn't essential to a working Windows.

That Partition Magic screenshot suggests that you have an old version of GNU parted. Have you had a look with SystemRescueCD? Version 3.0 and later include UEFI boot capabilities and will allow you to run gparted without automounting everything – always a bad idea and a good reason not to use a standard Live CD.

If you took a clone early enough in your diagnostics, now would be a good time to restore it, but I think you're out of luck – it was probably like this when you received it.

Silver lining: the Recovery partition looks to be intact ...