A month ago I was trying to help someone make a recovery boot disk for his Dell laptop. In the process my own personal laptop has gone down. I have been trying to research and follow leads to get it back up, but I am lost. Hoping someone can help point me in the right direction.
It began when I went to the following Dell site to follow instructions (at bottom of the post I think). The actual link I used was off that page under Step 1: “Download and install the Dell OS Recovery Tool”, but this page shows the steps I followed.
I ran that file to create the Dell OS recovery media (the jump drive). I then chose the option that it was for another computer, and entered the service tag. After the download completed either I turned my computer off or it turned off on its own, I honestly can’t remember because I was tired. A few hours later when I turned it back on I was taken to the Windows Recovery Environment but my only options are “Troubleshoot” and “Turn off your PC”. “Continue” and “Use a device” are not showing up.
I know the Dell boot disk was successfully created because the jump drive shows as a “Dell boot disk” as the volume name in other machines. I’m just not sure what happened to my laptop. The boot disk format only took about 15 mins from start to finish which was certainly not long enough to format even 1, of my drives, let alone all 3, but I can’t access any of them.
I went to advanced options under troubleshoot and chose startup repair. I received the message “startup repair couldn’t repair your PC”.
I then tried System Restore and received the message “to use system restore you must specify which windows installation to restore”. I tried System Image recovery only to get an internal error “Status_Wait_2 (0x80070002)”.
Uninstalling the latest quality or feature updates “runs into a problem and won’t be able to uninstall.” Basically my only options are Command Prompt and UEFI Firmware Settings.
I searched and found some answers to each of these issues, all of which began from the Command Prompt, so I headed there. It loaded to the temporary boot drive X:\Windows\System32.
I have 3 physical drives. I tried to go to each of these drives, and could not access any of them.
C: which is an SSD
D: which is another SSD
H: which is an internal HDD.
I can no longer see any of them. I can however see jump drives when I plug them in. The jump drive I used to create the Dell Restoration Disk actually comes up as both C: and D: Volumes, with different serial numbers and file creation dates. These volumes are where 2 individual physical SSD drives normally would be. I believe X: is a partition of the main volume where the C: drive sits, which leads me believe the drive itself is okay.
When I load the bios, with no jump drives plugged in, it still sees all 3 physical drives. It shows their serial and model numbers and lists them HDD0, HDD1, & HDD2. I was also able to enable the Harddisk security password on HDD2.
I wanted to make sure all the drives were still connected well. I had personally installed the additional SSD and HDD when I bought the laptop a year ago. I used to build computers, so I’m confident everything is ok hardwear wise. Just for good measure I went ahead and opened the case, unplugged all 3 drives, and then reseated them.
I went back to command prompt and started trying commands. My Logitech unified mouse still works, so I feel like some of the drivers are still installed. Maybe the HDD drivers are not loading or mounting the drive?
“SFC /scannow” said verification phase of the system scan was 100% complete. Then it said Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation, and took me back to the prompt.
Bootrec returns the following messages; Bootrec /FixMbr and /Fixboot “the system cannot find the path specified” Bootrec/Rebuildbcd and /ScanOs “total identified windows installations: 0. The operation completed successfully”
I launched diskpart. An item of note here, my computer keeps renaming itself at every restart. It always has the same prefix of MININT- but the last 7 letters/numbers change. This is neither the original computer name nor the name I gave it. I understand it to be a preinstallation name auto-populated for Minimum Windows NT. I mention it only to be as detailed with all the information I have.
DISKPART> list disk There are no fixed disks to show.
DISKPART> list volume There are no volumes.
DISKPART> list partition There is no disk selected to list partitions. Select a disk and try again.
DISKPART> list vdisk There are no virtual disks to show.
I understand what volumes and disks and partitions are, and obviously when I plug in my jump drives I can see those. I don’t know if it’s even possible to set them back up to their previous structure to retrieve all the data properly.
Some other things I have tried.
“Bcdedit /enum all” comes back with a message that the boot configuration data store could not be opened. The requested system device cannot be found. Bcdedit |find “osdevice” brings no result.
X:\>chkdsk The type of the file system is NTFS. The shadow copy provider had an unexpected error while trying to process the specified operation. The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk might report errors when no corruption is present. Volume label is Boot. WARNINGI /F parameter not specified. Running CHKDSK in read-only mode. Read-only chkdsk found bad on-disk uppercase table - using system table.
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure 29 file records processed. File verification completed. Phase duration (File record verification): 1.33 milliseconds. 0 large file records processed. Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 0.34 milliseconds. 0 bad file records processed. Phase duration (Bad file record checking): 0.49 milliseconds.
Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ... 43 index entries processed. Index verification completed. Phase duration (Index verification): 0.63 milliseconds. 0 unindexed files scanned. Phase duration (Orphan reconnection): 0.30 milliseconds. 0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found. Phase duration (Orphan recovery to lost and found): 0.28 milliseconds. 0 reparse records processed. 0 reparse records processed. Phase duration (Reparse point and Object ID verification): 0.60 milliseconds.
Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ... Security descriptor verification completed. Phase duration (Security descriptor verification): 8.36 milliseconds. 7 data files processed. Phase duration (Data attribute verification): 0.28 milliseconds. Errors detected in the uppercase file.
Windows has checked the file system and found problems, Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these 3086 KB total disk space. 4 KB in 9 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 2485 KB in use by the system. 2048 KB occupied by the log file. 597 KB available on disk. 512 bytes in each allocation unit. 6173 total allocation units on disk. 1195 allocation units available on disk. Total duration: 4.80 milliseconds (4 ms). Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 6.
I realize this is checking the boot drive of X: but that is because chkdsk c: returns “cannot open volume for direct access”. Chkdsk X: /F returns “the type of file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected”.
DISM & Reagentc.exe both seem important, but too complicated for me without knowing exactly what commands to give and in what order I should give them. I don’t want to chance losing the data by making a guess.
I’m wondering what my best course of action is here? At this point I don’t think I could even run virus software if there is no drive seen to scan. I can’t afford a data recovery service, but could possibly get the software or hardware to do it myself. Is this a better route than trying to use a Windows recovery disk? If so, are there any recommendations of which software or hardware to get? If there are command parameters above that I did not get right, or did not try, please let me know. I’m happy to give it a shot.
Thanks!
