Solved Back Up Image corrupted my hdd, PC won't boot up.

My apologies if this problem has been addressed before. It's difficult to search for Back Up Tool THEN problem when so many threads contain problem THEN Back Up Tool.

Problem Description: For the first time, I decided to back up my C: Drive using the Windows back up image tool. I selected my internal D: drive as the storage target. The recovery tool ran, and ran, and ran. The "back up" portion of the event had finished, but the "create shadow copy" went on for a good hour before I aborted the activity. The tool window never closed. After a while I hit the "x" button, but the window remained open. I clicked the shutdown icon and selected "restart", the restarting screen came up and remained for another hour or so before I cut the power to my pc.

Immediate problem: Now, my PC won't boot up. It gets to the windows 8 icon and the spinning dots never stop circling each other.

Attempted remedies: If I disconnect the SATA cable to my D: drive, the pc boots up. I can then connect the D: drive as an external and it will load. I deleted the back up image folder and the .dat file that was created on it. These are the only 2 files I could see created around the time of the back up, with "show hidden files" enabled. However if I reconnect the drive as an internal, my PC still won't boot. I have tried reverting to an older system restore point, but this has not affected whatever is going on during bootup.

What has Windows Back Up image Tool changed that won't allow my D: drive to be connected during boot? How can I remedy this?

Probably unnecessary background info: Last week I decided to clean up my computer, do a fresh install of windows and create a back up so that I *hopefully* never have to clean from scratch again. I had to start by installing windows 7 from DVD. I kept nothing on my 60gb SSD C: drive. Fresh install. Run windows update, then upgrade to Window 8 via a code I got from the "buy win 7 computer and purchase win 8 upgrade for $17" promotion when win 8 first came out. I ran win update again, which bricked my pc with a corrupt update sending it into a continuous loop of "update failed, reverting to old settings" over and over. I reinstalled Win 8 and tried selecting different updates. After 8 or so selections, the list of 72 "required" updates disappeared, and I could finally upgrade to 8.1 After 3 days of these install shenanigans, and finally getting my personal necessity programs installed (chrome, photoshop, etc) I was ready to create a windows back up image. This brings me to the current scenario.

I don't know what other info would be necessary for this problem... my D: drive is a 1TB MyBook HDD that I took apart and plugged in as an internal. 16 gb of ram, 3.8- 6core AMD processor, yadda yadda.

Greatly appreciate any advice or ideas to try and get my PC running again with the D: drive as an internal.
Thanks!

Can you wipe the 1TB drive using diskpart clean command or is there data on there you don't want to lose? If you can wipe it you can then partition and quick format it and it should be useable again.

There is data on the drive. More than I can organize and store elsewhere.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't suspect that this is an issue with the drive itself. Windows on my C: drive is trying to do something with this drive during boot.

I can connect this drive as an external via usb and the PC will boot fine. I tried plugging the drive into a different sata connection internally but it still wouldn't boot up. Does windows recognize this drive as something different when it's plugged in externally?

Put it in the external case then take alook at it with Disk Management, see if it has somehow been marked as Active. If yes, remove the Active designation, either via Disk Management or disk[art from a Command Prompt.

Okay, I'm apparently not very familiar with the Disk Management interface. I don't see any clear labels that distinguish either my C: drive or D: drive as "active". Both are described as Healthy/Primary. Only C: has "Boot" labelled. Right clicking either shows a faded "mark partition as active" option. Does that mean they are both active? If so, what's the instructions to deactivate the D: drive?

Another thing, does the 1TB drive happen to somehow have an EFI system partition?

No, Disk Management doesn't see any other partitions than the primary one for the D: drive.

This is embarrassing, I just looked at Disk Management on my Windows 8 Pro X64 system and none of the partitions are marked as Active either.



I checked my Windows 7 Pro X64 system and it does show Active.



I'm sure Windows 8 did show the Active flag before. Must be a Windows Update that screwed it up.

Open a Elevated Command Prompt:

Click on the Start button and type cmd.
DO NOT press Enter or click Go.
Look at the upper part of the window and you will see cmd.exe.
Right click on it and select Run as Administrator.

Then use diskpart, list disk and list vol as shown below and post the results (I'm enclosing in a code box to preserve formatting):

You can use Copy and Paste from the Command Prompt window. Just right click on the Command Prompt window title bar and select Edit then Copy, highlight the information then press the Right Mouse button. Come here and paste into a reply.

Thanks for the detailed instructions.

That doesn't show the My Book (D as being bootable which is good.

You could try doing Startup Repair up to 3 times, see if it fixes the problem of booting with D: connected.
See here: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2843-automatic-repair-run-windows-8-a.html

Automatic repair has failed 3 (+) times.

I made the next move to attempt fixboot. First I targeted the EFI partition as described here: How to repair the EFI Bootloader in Windows 8 - fixedByVonnie

This went well, but fixed nothing.
Next I just attempted /fixboot and /rebuildbcd from the default x:/sources directory. Fixboot went fine, but RebuildBCD went:

That sounds like a problem, but I can still boot into windows so long as D: is plugged in externally.

I did get a bsod upon reboot from recovery, with error 0xc0000001, but it didn't come back after a restart.

I was able to back up a system image to the D: drive with it plugged in as an external. I guess it's time to reinstall the system from 8.0 and see if the problem stays behind? I've never done a "Refresh Windows" before, any idea if that would possibly fix any boot problems or should I just do a complete wipe of the C: drive?

Yes, a refresh should correct the problem.

Good tutorial here: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2293-refresh-windows-8-a.html

Well, Refresh and Restore is pulling that "disk is locked" and "partition is missing" crap on me. So I guess a drive wipe and complete reinstall will have to do. I just hope I can make it through the windows 8 updates in a single go this time. 5 days and 3 re-dos just to get a system installed and updated. What a load.

Thanks for taking the time and giving advice to help me through this. Definitely a much more tolerable experience when I'm not making guesses by myself.

Macrium Reflect has a very good boot repair operation. You run it on bootup from a USB drive created by Macrium (free). It might be worth a try. It has worked for me a couple of times.

Ztruker said:

This is embarrassing, I just looked at Disk Management on my Windows 8 Pro X64 system and none of the partitions are marked as Active either.

Click to expand...

I don't have any active partitions either (UEFI boot), I think you might only need an active partition for an MBR boot.

nearly 4 hours and 3 reinstalls later, it looks like I'm on the home stretch to upgrade to 8.1 again. I'm completely baffled by the fact that I reformatted / deleted / and reinstalled the whole sdd 3 times and every time I boot up a new windows 8, half of my settings are already there. Maybe that's convenient, but it just makes me feel like something is horribly wrong. I could understand the cloud restoring my personal settings on sign in, but when I installed windows 8 last week I needed to install the drivers for my ethernet adapter manually. Why does it work now? Even my graphic card driver is the latest version, how was that saved? Oh well, I'm pretty sick of messing with it and it seems to work...

Windows didn't even recognize the back up that I made while trying to sort through this mess. Is Macrium the suggested way to make a system image once I'm confident things are stable? I notice that the free version of Glary's Utilities also offers this service. I still want to believe that windows should make a windows back up, and I wouldn't mind dedicating a massive usb stick to it (via: recovery disk method), but this experience has left me so insecure of windows features... Any experienced suggestions?

saturdayxiii said:

Is Macrium the suggested way to make a system image once I'm confident things are stable?

Click to expand...

I like Macrium, the backup is one file and it's compressed. I haven't had any problems using it. It takes less than 5 minutes to make a backup of my system partitions (about 32GB) and the compressed size is around 17GB.

Crashed again.... Just got 8.1 installed. I don't know if I just started in a bad place? I decided to adjust my page file first. I have 16gb of ram, so set that to start at 16mb and end at 1024mb. It asked to restart, I said no. I then installed the latest driver for my amd chipset, which has never been a problem before. It asked to restart again, so i thought I should before I get too far ahead of myself, and what do you know? The spinning circles of doom are here to stay. It doesn't seem to matter whether my D: drive is plugged in or not this time. Is that an improvement? I've tried automatic repair again, maybe I'll try macrium's rescue disk, but I don't know.
Why does this stuff keep affecting my boot?


EDIT: Correction. It's a little slow, but removing the D: drive once again allows the computer to boot. Maybe I need to avoid those chipset drivers? The OS works without installing them, I just always figured it would be better to have them installed...

saturdayxiii said:

nearly 4 hours and 3 reinstalls later, it looks like I'm on the home stretch to upgrade to 8.1 again. I'm completely baffled by the fact that I reformatted / deleted / and reinstalled the whole sdd 3 times and every time I boot up a new windows 8, half of my settings are already there. Maybe that's convenient, but it just makes me feel like something is horribly wrong. I could understand the cloud restoring my personal settings on sign in, but when I installed windows 8 last week I needed to install the drivers for my ethernet adapter manually. Why does it work now? Even my graphic card driver is the latest version, how was that saved? Oh well, I'm pretty sick of messing with it and it seems to work...

Windows didn't even recognize the back up that I made while trying to sort through this mess. Is Macrium the suggested way to make a system image once I'm confident things are stable? I notice that the free version of Glary's Utilities also offers this service. I still want to believe that windows should make a windows back up, and I wouldn't mind dedicating a massive usb stick to it (via: recovery disk method), but this experience has left me so insecure of windows features... Any experienced suggestions?

Click to expand...

Are you using a windows account to login with? If so, that is one of it's benifits. It remembers your setting so if you reinstall it puts them back for you.

Ronster said:

Ztruker said:

This is embarrassing, I just looked at Disk Management on my Windows 8 Pro X64 system and none of the partitions are marked as Active either.

Click to expand...

I don't have any active partitions either (UEFI boot), I think you might only need an active partition for an MBR boot.

Click to expand...

I think that is definitely the case though I would swear I had the Active with this Lenovo Ideacenter K450 system. Oh well, I opened a thread about it, will see what responses I get.