Continuation of my last post...My experience recovering Windows 8 boot loader
Recovery attempt using Windows Installation/Recovery Disk
Since none of my previous attempts to restore Windows 8 boot loader worked, the only option i have now is to somehow recover windows 8 without losing data or my partitions. I had created a recovery point in windows but that will work only if i could somehow boot into windows using installation or recovery CD. Unfortunately i did not create recovery disk yet since this was new laptop. I also found a recovery disk here but didn't try it since i wasn't sure if it was safe to use.
I didn't have windows 8 OS media either. Downloaded it from the Internet and burned it into a DVD using the external DVD i had (my laptop doesn't have optical drive). In parallel tried to find and read as much help as i could possibly find in the Internet. Below I have back linked some of the links I got much info from.
Attempt to recover using Windows 8 installation media
Booted to Windows 8 from the DVD i just created. It did not ask for "Repair windows" option as mentioned in the tutorial here. Instead it just asked me to choose the Keyboard layout and went ahead with installing Windows 8. So i cancelled it immediately. I didn't want to install the OS again - all i wanted was to find a way to recover the existing OS. Note that if this step had showed me that windows is present in the disk and the recovery options for the same it would have been easy.
Attempt to recover using Windows 8 Recovery disk
I had a Windows 8 recovery Disk from another computer (HP laptop). I booted from the recovery CD. It showed the following options as shown here: System Restore, System Image Recovery, Automatic Repair and Command prompt). First tried the System Restore option and it threw error saying it couldn't find any image. Strange since i had created an image. Entered into command prompt to troubleshoot the same and found that hard disk wasn't detected. This may be because driver for the hard drive was not present in the recovery CD (may be because the recovery disk I used was for another laptop). I had all drivers in another partition in my laptop. So booted to Ubuntu, copied the drivers to an external USB drive. Rebooted using recovery CD again. Went into command prompt and loaded the drivers for my harddrive using drvload command. I was able to see the drive and all partitions in the drives from command prompt. Read this for more help on listing drives from command prompt.
Attempt 1:
I could see my windows partitions. So proceeded with boot loader recovery.
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
Rebooted. Still couldn't boot into windows (not sure why!). I felt that using recovery disk of another laptop might be risky but i am not sure if that is true. But now that i know the problem we saw above (no recovery option shown) was due to driver issue, may be i can load the drivers manually and attempt other options. So tried that.
At the installation prompt Hit Shift+F10 and used drvload to load drivers. As soon as i came out of command prompt it showed me the Recover Windows Option.
Selected Recover Windows option (had to load the drivers manually again). Then tried few more bootrec commands in command prompt:
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
Rebooted. Still couldn't boot into windows; all it showed was a blank screen and i still don't have a clue why it didn't work. I could sense where this is going (reset?) but continued.
Note, for all the below trials I booted from Windows 8 installation media, Loaded drivers manually using Shift+F12 and Drvload and choose Recover Windows Option. Since this was a generic Windows 8 installation media i thought it would be safe to try other Recovery options.
Trial 1:
First i tried Automatic Repair. It ran but after that too still i couldn't boot to windows 8.
Trial 2:
Tried the System Restore option. It showed me the recovery point which was created when i installed EasyBCD. It said EasyBCD won't be available if i use that image since that was what i wanted i proceeded with that option. After 20 mins or so restore completed.
Rebooted the machine and boom blank screen! May be this option wouldn't restore bootfiles or bootrec - so i thought.
Trial 3: Success! At last
Tried the next option Refresh Windows. This asked me to select the drive. I selected c: (thankfully all my data were in other paritions). I started to "refresh" windows again. After about 30 mins i was able to boot to Windows but this time Windows 8 boot loader showed me 3 windows 8 options all pointing to the same copy. Booted into windows. In my desktop there was a file with the list of all programs removed from the system. It for some reason didn't have many of them like Office 2013, Firefox etc. Since my data partition had all programs downloaded already i reinstalled all required apps from that. Only thing i had to redownload was Office 2013 since it installs from Office 365 servers directly (One Click Install file).
So after a 20Hrs marathon fix I got back Windows 8 and access to outlook (i had a copy of my ost file so didn't have to download all mails again).
Recovery attempt using Windows Installation/Recovery Disk
Since none of my previous attempts to restore Windows 8 boot loader worked, the only option i have now is to somehow recover windows 8 without losing data or my partitions. I had created a recovery point in windows but that will work only if i could somehow boot into windows using installation or recovery CD. Unfortunately i did not create recovery disk yet since this was new laptop. I also found a recovery disk here but didn't try it since i wasn't sure if it was safe to use.
I didn't have windows 8 OS media either. Downloaded it from the Internet and burned it into a DVD using the external DVD i had (my laptop doesn't have optical drive). In parallel tried to find and read as much help as i could possibly find in the Internet. Below I have back linked some of the links I got much info from.
Attempt to recover using Windows 8 installation media
Booted to Windows 8 from the DVD i just created. It did not ask for "Repair windows" option as mentioned in the tutorial here. Instead it just asked me to choose the Keyboard layout and went ahead with installing Windows 8. So i cancelled it immediately. I didn't want to install the OS again - all i wanted was to find a way to recover the existing OS. Note that if this step had showed me that windows is present in the disk and the recovery options for the same it would have been easy.
Attempt to recover using Windows 8 Recovery disk
I had a Windows 8 recovery Disk from another computer (HP laptop). I booted from the recovery CD. It showed the following options as shown here: System Restore, System Image Recovery, Automatic Repair and Command prompt). First tried the System Restore option and it threw error saying it couldn't find any image. Strange since i had created an image. Entered into command prompt to troubleshoot the same and found that hard disk wasn't detected. This may be because driver for the hard drive was not present in the recovery CD (may be because the recovery disk I used was for another laptop). I had all drivers in another partition in my laptop. So booted to Ubuntu, copied the drivers to an external USB drive. Rebooted using recovery CD again. Went into command prompt and loaded the drivers for my harddrive using drvload command. I was able to see the drive and all partitions in the drives from command prompt. Read this for more help on listing drives from command prompt.
Attempt 1:
I could see my windows partitions. So proceeded with boot loader recovery.
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
Rebooted. Still couldn't boot into windows (not sure why!). I felt that using recovery disk of another laptop might be risky but i am not sure if that is true. But now that i know the problem we saw above (no recovery option shown) was due to driver issue, may be i can load the drivers manually and attempt other options. So tried that.
At the installation prompt Hit Shift+F10 and used drvload to load drivers. As soon as i came out of command prompt it showed me the Recover Windows Option.
Selected Recover Windows option (had to load the drivers manually again). Then tried few more bootrec commands in command prompt:
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcdRebooted. Still couldn't boot into windows; all it showed was a blank screen and i still don't have a clue why it didn't work. I could sense where this is going (reset?) but continued.
Note, for all the below trials I booted from Windows 8 installation media, Loaded drivers manually using Shift+F12 and Drvload and choose Recover Windows Option. Since this was a generic Windows 8 installation media i thought it would be safe to try other Recovery options.
Trial 1:
First i tried Automatic Repair. It ran but after that too still i couldn't boot to windows 8.
Trial 2:
Tried the System Restore option. It showed me the recovery point which was created when i installed EasyBCD. It said EasyBCD won't be available if i use that image since that was what i wanted i proceeded with that option. After 20 mins or so restore completed.
Rebooted the machine and boom blank screen! May be this option wouldn't restore bootfiles or bootrec - so i thought.
Trial 3: Success! At last
So after a 20Hrs marathon fix I got back Windows 8 and access to outlook (i had a copy of my ost file so didn't have to download all mails again).
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