Can't boot other than BIOS, stuck on Automatic Repair

Hi all,
I'm new here so bear with me if I don't know forum etiquette, but from google searches this seemed like a good place to ask questions.

So here's the situation: last night before going to bed my laptop said it was going to update within a day. I closed the lid as usual and the next day, when I opened it, it was stuck on a blank screen for a few minutes then up came the Asus screen, then into Automatic Repair, then Diagnosing your PC, then "Repairing Disk Errors. This might take more than an hour to complete."

I let it run for about 4 hours but with no effect. I tried a few times to no avail. No matter what I do - F8, F10, F12 - I can't do anything other than get into Bios. I fiddled around with some options, but there weren't many and nothing worked. Finally, I removed the hard drive and attached it to another laptop with a caddy and couldn't get in - it is corrupted and unreadable.

So do I simply need a new hard drive? Or is it possible the problem is even worse? A friend says he has a tool that might be able to retrieve some of my files, but at least my most important ones are in Dropbox.

The other concern I have is that even when I install a new hard drive, I don't know how to get an operating system back up. The laptop didn't come with a disk. How do i go about installing an OS? Windows 7 would be preferable, although it did have 8 on it previously.

oh yeah, the laptop is an Asus Ultrabook S400C. It doesn't have an internal cd drive.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Can you not boot into windows through your BIOS?

williamdry said:

Can you not boot into windows through your BIOS?

Click to expand...

How do I do that? the only boot option in bios is Windows Boot Manager.

And if you click on "Windows Boot Manager" does it not boot into windows? I am sorry, maybe I misunderstood your original post.

windows boot manager is boot option #1 and seemingly the only option, so its already selected.

and no, it doesn't go into windows but instead cycles back into Automatic Repair

might not help ,but cant hurt,
shutdown the laptop ,remove the battery and the power adapter ,hold In the power button for about 40 seconds ,replace the battery ,plug in the power adapter and turn on the laptop ,what happens

I had this happen to me, I suspected the hard drive and put in a new and installed the OS. As soon as the OS was installed and went to boot it for the first time, the Automatic Repair started all over again. So, after several attempts of install and hard drive suspicions. I finally wised up and started checking other things. I removed any peripherals that were attached via usb, had nothing but the keyboard and mouse connected, got the same thing...automatic repair. I looked at the RAM (Had 8gb) removed 4gb( and low and behold the system started up normally. Now I got lucky and moved the bad ram just by chance. To confirm the RAM was the issue, I removed the 4gb of ram that was working and put in the first 4gb of ram that I had removed, and sure enough, here came the automatic repair option once again. Again, I took out the bad ram and put in the good ram and the system booted just like normal.

So, the moral of this story is simple, check the RAM before you do OS install, hard drive swaps, and any other checks you just might save your self some time.

After I was all done and thought I had it all repaired...my replacement hard drive that I had installed when I thought the first one was had died (a week later). I reinstalled the original hard drive and it has been working just fine.

Hope this helps!