Windows 10: Recovering laptop with failed harddrive, unusable recovery USB and machine won't boot.

Yes. I have searched and searched and have not yet found the solution.


in 2013, I purchased a Toshiba laptop with windows 8 on it. At the time, I made a recovery USB as recommended and squirreled it away for safekeeping. Since then, I took advantage of the Windows 10 upgrade and have installed several applications such as MS Office and several things for school. I have also taken every update that Microsoft has rolled out, even when I had to fix things afterwards.


Within the past month, the laptop has experienced lockups and performance issues. The event log indicated that I was starting to get disk errors. Using chkdsk /r, I was able to prolong the life of the disk until I was able to buy a new one (at the time, the problem was hangs and slowdowns but it would still boot to Windows).


Now the issue.

The next time I attempted to boot, I received a message of "Boot device not found". I am unable to get anywhere other than into the bios. The bios recognizes the hard drive. I have tried several 'fixes' including changing bios settings (for boot mode and secure boot), chkdsk, bootmgr commands, etc.

I had been fairly diligent about backing up my personal files to a WD Passport external drive so I am not concerned about those but it turns out that the WD backup does not include system files and other applications.... just items from Users and below.

I purchased another laptop (I was trying to avoid this) because the failed Toshiba was the only computer in my home for 4 people. From the new laptop (a Dell latitude w/ Win 10 home), I even tried to create a recovery USB and boot the Toshiba from that. I got into the recovery menus but the selection "Startup Repair" failed. The only other viable option looked like to recover the device from the recovery USB. I did not like this option since it would be like illegally copying my Dell Windows 10 version and putting it onto the Toshiba. I tried this anyway and the recovery ran for several minutes and ended with a report of "There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made". I am assuming that this is due to the recovery USB coming from a different laptop.

I have searched extensively and all the recommended solutions seem to be for people who have magic systems that can create bootable images from a device that that can't boot or who somehow received product installation CDs with their original purchase (which is a thing of the WAY past).


At this point, I have a laptop without a hard drive (the Toshiba), a hard drive that fails to boot (a Toshiba drive), a new hard drive (a Seagate to replace the failed Toshiba drive), and no way to put the operating system (Windows 10) back on it so it can be used. On my failed hard drive, there is a copy of my operating system but I can't get at it other than to look at files when I hookup the Toshiba drive via usb adapter and plug it into my new laptop.


I just need to get this laptop back in operation and I hope there is a way you can either tell me exactly how to get my OS from my failed toshiba drive onto the new Seagate drive or how to get an installable version of windows 10 to replace the one that will not recover without dropping another hundred dollars at the store.


Please help.

:)

 

Boot Surface Laptop to USB - no Volume button


Hello Jimmy,

This doesn't list the "Surface Laptop", but you might give it a try to see.

*Arrow Boot Microsoft Surface from a USB device

Otherwise, you should be able to use OPTION ONE below to boot from the USB from advanced startup.

*Arrow Boot from USB Drive on Windows 10 PC Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials

 

How does Windows boot to advanced recovery option e.g. command prompt?

- that gives me a 454 'Unexpected error' This tells me that the BCD is partially corrupted.

The commands: shutdown.exe /r /o /f /t 00
or: %SystemRoot%\System32\Cmd.exe /c reagentc /boottore&shutdown /r /f /t 00
should boot into Recovery if everything is configured correctly.
FYI, If Windows is configured correctly:

1. If Reagentc is disabled, you still can get into Recovery but with limited options.
2. If Reagentc is enabled, you'll get all options.
3. If you boot Windows using Recovery USB stick, You'll get into Recovery with couple of options missing.

Here's my suggestion if you want to try:
OPTION 1: Will save the trouble of re-install Windows.

1. Download the image of my first 3 partitions (450MB Recovery, 100 MB EFI partition, and 16MB unformatted primary)
   EFI_Boot-00-00.7z - Google Drive
2. Run Macrium and restore the image from step 1, overwriting your existing 1st three partitions, leaving C alone.
3. Delete the 490MB Recovery partition.
4. From Macrium, run fix boot problems.
5. Reboot. Open Admin command prompt then run Reagentc /info to make sure that it is enabled. If not, enable it.
   if failed to enable, reboot and try again.

OPTION 2: Assuming you've already had Windows backup with Macrium.

1. Wipe out the first 5 parttiions. (450MB, 100MB, 16MB, C Drive, 480MB)
2. Fresh install Windows 10
3. Restore C drive from backup image, run fix boot problems
4. repeat step 5 from OPTION 1 above.

 

My pc won´t boot Windows 10 from USB/DVD

So I wanted to change from my Windows 10 x32 bits to 64x. I downloaded the Mediacreationtool and used it in both a USB and a DVD. Tried used the usb, the disk and both at the same time but they won´t boot.

I have a P7H55-M motherboard, the BIOS is updated and configured to boot first DVD, second usb and third SATA.

So if someone could help me it´d be great.