Windows 8 help

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ohio_grad_06

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Ok. I give. I usually am better am a better tech than this but where to begin. So I get a call to look at a machine saying basically the computer will not start. Windows 8. Yeck! Get onsite, realized it is a windows 8 PC, didn't really have a lot with me, but had my handy Parted Magic cd with me. I've worked some with Windows 8 before, but only on my personal PC, or training users hwo to use it. Not actually repairing, reinstalling as of yet. In the last year or two, I've had 5 or so people even ask about it. The couple I have had for repairs were simple virus cleanups not big deals.

So I get there, and this thing is in a boot loop. IE it won't start, it keeps diagnosing the PC, and then it attempts to perform a repair, which it is unable to do and so it reboots, attempts to diagnose the PC, etc etc and the process continues on and on and on.

Did the following.

1. Go into bios and disabled secure boot, disable fast boot options.
2. Booted from parted magic usb stick which gives me the gui works ok. I run a quick test of gsmartcontrol on the hard drive which comes back with no errors. So one would think the drive is ok.
3. Here's where life gets interesting. I attempt to look at the partitions, which I can see a recovery partition, and parted magic allows me to look at that ok great. But cannot view the OS partition. I can see it's there, but unable to mount it. Being it's late, I tell the user let me take it back with me and look at it some more and do some research.
4. Only Windows 8 discs I have are Windows 8 Pro upgrade discs which I bought to upgrade my system with. Couldn't get the machine to safe mode, so I figured well I'll boot from my disk. I boot from my Windows 8 pro upgrade discs, it won't boot the 32 bit OS disk, it will boot the 64 bit.
5. I booted up, tried to do advanced options, and have it do automatic repair. If I do automatic repair, it goes back into the boot loop.
6. Attempted system restore, but no restore points found.
7. Getting interesting. I attempt to do a system refresh(the option that just deletes the apps and leaves the files), however I get a message that the disk is locked.
8. I'm remiss to do the reset option where it just deletes everything, give the machine to the client and say sorry had to blow it away.
9. Downloaded the Windows 8 PE cd listed in the forums, though I had a copy before, started the machine from that, and it works, I had read in the forums something about you may need to slave some of these windows 8 drives to another pc to run checkdisk, so I attempted to do it from the cd, which I get a message about not being able to access the disk.

I downloaded rweverything portable, and attempted to read the windows 8 key from the bios. Unsure if the version is Windows 8 or Windows 8.1. User states that the computer is about 1.5 years old. So my guess is Windows 8, but not sure if he did the upgrade to 8.1. Also it's a cheaper home grade system, so should not be the pro version.

I know Windows 8.1 started doing disk encryption by default, wondering if this is why I can't see the hard files.


Here is where the rubber meets the road.

a. I can boot from other discs, including Windows 8 PE, so the hardware is at some level functional and working correctly.
b. GSmart Control says the hard drive is good. I can look in the Disk Management screen under Computer Management-->Disk Management in the Admin tools section of the Windows 8 PE disc, it says it sees C drive and that's it's healthy.
c. If I try to access the C drive from the Windows 8 PE cd, it tells me the file system is corrupted. If I try to run checkdisk I'm told I can't because the drive is not accessible.

I pulled what I think is the Windows 8 SN and I have the users login info for their MS live account which they provided. I also have a spare hard drive that I can test with.

However, I don't have any Windows 8 discs other than my Windows 8 Pro upgrades.

I tried to track down Windows 8 trials, but they seem to be for enterprise, and for Windows 8.1. Is there a way to obtain legally discs for Windows 8 or 8.1? Also do you believe the hard drive is actually bad though reported good? Corrupted maybe or encrypted? If encrypted, game over most likely for the file recovery.

Sorry for the long post. Just trying to do some digging and frustrated. Windows 8. BAH!!! Can't wait till MS gets rid of 8.
 
Sorry. It's an OEM, Gateway to be exact.

Gateway SX2110G to be exact. Appears to have an AMD E1-1200 CPU with 4gb of ram.

I found a link on a site called softzilla to download, but that link just does not sound legit.

I knew I'd heard of ways to try to download the upgrade and basically make the installer fail and you could get an iso file, but with their key that does not work being it's an OEM. Any ideas or do I need to just order the media from gateway and tell them looks like the hard drive may be hosed?

I must admit, been working with PC's since I was 17, but this one is interesting.
 
Last edited:
If it was me I would just order the media from Gateway. But all the OEM's ship with disk build utilities. So I'm guessing that the EU did not make them. So common unfortunately.
 
Drat. Afraid of that. Too bad it's not Windows 7 where you could simply download the iso if needed.

Let me ask this. Hard drive. Do you think what I described is an encryption type of deal or do you think that the drive is hosed even though it reports healthy? Wonder if I'm going to have to end up zero writing that drive.
 
ohio_grad_06 said:
Drat. Afraid of that. Too bad it's not Windows 7 where you could simply download the iso if needed.

Let me ask this. Hard drive. Do you think what I described is an encryption type of deal or do you think that the drive is hosed even though it reports healthy? Wonder if I'm going to have to end up zero writing that drive.
Click to expand...

No way to know with out more work. If you can pull the HD, slave it to your box. You can download a trial version of R-Studio. It will do a full scan but will only let you recover 64k and smaller files. But still enough to see if anything is there to recover.

I doubt it is encrypted unless the EU said they have done that.
 
markverhyden said:
No way to know with out more work. If you can pull the HD, slave it to your box. You can download a trial version of R-Studio. It will do a full scan but will only let you recover 64k and smaller files. But still enough to see if anything is there to recover.

I doubt it is encrypted unless the EU said they have done that.
Click to expand...

I believe windows 8.1 encrypts by default if you're using a MS account to login. I don't know if that's the case when the system was Windows 8 to begin with and upgraded to 8.1.
 
The Windows 8 pe has the recovery thing on it. Also I voted off my Windows 8 pro upgrade and it allows me to see the recovery options as well. thanks for that tip though. :D
 
Ok so wild find here. I had a spare hard drive to test with. For the sake of my own curiosity, I unhooked the hard drive, and plugged in my spare drive to this system. As I said, for Windows 8, I just simply had the Windows 8 Pro Upgrade disc that most of us probably grabbed for $40 bucks. The machine is supposed to be just a standard Windows 8.

I put that disc in, told it I wanted to install, and BAM. It only asked for me to accept the license terms, it did NOT ask me for a product key or anything. It simply went directly through the install procedure and allowed me to do the basic setup. Once that was done, I could go into control panel and look at the System Properties. It reads correctly as Windows 8, not Windows 8 Pro, but just standard Windows 8. Also as soon as I hooked up to internet, it proceeded to activate without my asking, and I can confirm also that the rweverything tool seems accurate in that the serial number I pulled from the bios of the PC, the 5 digits in Windows 8 appear to match the file I created.

One of my first real experiences with repairing a Windows 8 PC aside from tinkering on my own system and a couple of others. But for those that haven't done much Windows 8 repairs, if you get a system that was Windows 8 initially, it would appear that once you have the iso, the installer does not seem to care if the Windows 8 version was standard or professional, and whether it was retail, upgrade or oem. My discs were upgrade discs, and I was going to go through the procedure of downloading a Windows 8 installer through the upgrade center where you put the product key in. When I put the OEM product key in there, their setup sqauked at me. When I used the installer I already had, the installer didn't seem to care, it was smart enough to see the key in the bios, and loaded the correct version off the install media.

I will say I did find a Windows 8.1 disc I had created some time ago.

This procedure outlines how to download a windows 8.1 iso with a windows 8 product key.

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-download-windows-81-iso-windows-8-product-key

Basically it involves you putting in your key, making the install fail, then you can get an option to download the full iso.

But I can confirm, with the Windows 8.1 installer, it did not in my case take the Windows 8 product key. So in this case, you are likely stuck installing Windows 8, doing all updates, then doing the upgrade from the store, but at least there appears to be a path. Now to find out if I can recover files from the original drive.

BTW, on bsod, it seems like you would always at least see them flash? At least it seems in older versions I would, though sometimes they flashed so quickly that you could not get the stop code.
 
That is normal. It has been covered about a billion times here on TN. EVERY Windows 8 disk is the same. And all OEM versions contain the install key in the bios.

As for the BSOD. Generally ANY reboot of the system is usually the result of a BSOD. I've seen plenty of system that did it so fast that you never saw the blue screen appear. If you have a slow video card that doesn't change modes quickly it is very easy for it to reboot before it has the change to display the error.

Also have you tried slaving that drive to a Windows 7 system. I bet you'll be able to read it then. You are having trouble because it is GPT formatted.
 
I'll have to pull the drive then. I'm assuming my Windows 8.1 system should work. Like I said I actually booted from the Windows 8 pe rescue dvd that is listed in the forums and it gives you a Windows 8/8.1 desktop environment and could not see files. Guess I assumed I should be able to see files from within there.

8 was actually trying to use the search as I remembered a thread where someone was dealing specifically with a bad Windows 8 hard drive and the thread had links for how to pull the key and download of trial version of the iso etc but couldn't seem to find it. Good to know that the installer discs are mostly the same. Anyone have a situation where the disc cannot read the key from the bios? As I said if you try to download the iso from the upgrade center with the key it rejects oem keys.
 
ohio_grad_06 said:
I remembered a thread where someone was dealing specifically with a bad Windows 8 hard drive and the thread had links for how to pull the key and download of trial version of the iso etc but couldn't seem to find it.
Click to expand...
Is this the thread you are looking for?



ohio_grad_06 said:
I'll have to pull the drive then. I'm assuming my Windows 8.1 system should work. Like I said I actually booted from the Windows 8 pe rescue dvd that is listed in the forums and it gives you a Windows 8/8.1 desktop environment and could not see files. Guess I assumed I should be able to see files from within there.
Click to expand...
Does the partition have windows BitLocker enabled?
Notice this part of the article:
What if someone tries to access my drive via a live CD or connected to another system? Does BitLocker still keep my data safe?
 
I have to look more at the bitlocker thing tomorrow as I don't know the answer on that. The machine was simply non bootable when I received it. But bitlocker being enabled on consumer systems seems silly. How do you just tell someone oh your files are gone now. Sorry.
 
1. Now that you have the computer back at your shop, you should have run an extended test using Gsmartcontrol. Did you do this? What were the results?

2. If everything passes, then we need to address the mounting issue. Windows 8 does not actually shutdown, it actually hibernates. This is Microsofts way to make boot up time faster. Anyways, you have to disable "Fast Startup" and then shutdown the computer in order to be able to mount the hard drive with read/write permissions. If you are unable to get into the operating system in order to change this, then you will have to mount the hard drive with read only permissions. This can usually be done in Linux using the terminal, but it really just depends on what version and flavor of Linux you are using.

3. Some other thoughts: Obviously you want to run a chkdsk to try and fix the corrupted file system. You may not be able to do this until you disable to the Fast Startup and shutdown. Also, for future references, you may want to start using bootrec.exe /fixmbr and bootrec.exe /fixboot to your chkdsk if and when you are having booting issues.

4. Also, I really hope that you plan on getting permission from the customer before you "blow away" their OS and Data.

5. If you do have to resort to a reintalll, then at least try and get the hard drive to mount in read only so that you can at least pull their data.

6. Finally, I do not remember what the steps were exactly (but I am sure you can google it), but there is a way to get past the locked hard drive error when doing a refresh.

I hope this helps.


EDIT: Oh, also do not forget to reset the bios back to the original settings, unless you plan on reinstalling the OS.
 
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