6ofTentacles
New Member
- Messages
- 9
Hi, all!
I have had my boss's daughter's laptop at my house all weekend, hoping to solve a bizarre problem I have never seen before for them. Windows 8.0 (I think, I'll get to that later!), HP Pavilion g7 notebook (64 bit, AMD.)
The main symptom is that when the daughter logs in her desktop comes all the way up, wallpaper and tiles and all, and then a second or two later POOF it's gone. Then it reappears, doing the fade-in number as if she had just logged in. Then POOF, gone. Rinse, repeat, as many times as you care to wait for. BUT her husband's login is fine (or so they tell me.) They are both admins.
Difficulty: No desktop for me to work from. Dad only brought me her password, not husband's also. Whole family is gone on vacation, two weeks.
Difficulty 2: first time I have ever touched Win 8.<anything>. My own main machine is Win 7/Mint Linux. Also have what you might call vast experience with XP due to having been an IT guy the last 15 years at a hospital that was basically wall to wall XP (and Dell) on the client side. I have an MSCE cert but it's in XP and Server 2003, and that's increasingly not relevant to anything. And no Win 8 until now.
My first thought was that Windows was probably barfing on something that's loaded at login for her profile but not his. So, safe mode! See if her login is stable with only the minimum loaded. And (since hers is an admin login) also run chkdsk, sfc /scannow, all the usual, with elevated privileges. OK..... MICROSOFT, Where-T-F HAVE YOU PUT SAFE MODE?
Well, I know where it is now but still haven't gotten there. I've found two working ways to an elevated command prompt and made it as far as \windows\system32\ and tried bcdedit. HP's recommended command there is BCDEDIT /SET {DEFAULT} BOOTMENUPOLICY LEGACY and reboot. All that gets me is
"The requested system device cannot be found."
I've also read the eightforums tutorials on bcdedit, every one I can find. While I was in ~\system32\ I wrote down that long identfier string but I haven't dared to try any commands that use it, because of
Difficulty 3: I can't back the system up before I take any chances with it, and I'm very nervous working without that safety net. No access to a working desktop, so I can't use Windows' own backup or make recovery media. (Owners did not make any recovery media, naturally.) I found and downloaded Wolfgang's WinPE Macrium Reflect 5.2 boot CD (large hat tip!) and thrashed around in the BIOS some until I got the system to boot from the CD drive. That's very familiar to me because I've used an earlier Macrium boot CD many times to image my Win7 box. Everything looks right except... It doesn't recognize either of my USB external hard drives so I've got nowhere to put the image. Also tried UBCD4WIN, which I have used hundreds of times to image XP systems. It bluescreens during bootup.
What will recognize my external drives is a Clonezilla Live CD, freshly downloaded, the Ubuntu-based one for AMD64 systems using UEFI boot mode. I thought that was a breakthrough, but it tells me two of the five partitions are marked dirty and won't image them until that's fixed. I have run the Automatic System Repair four times now. Twice it has reached the point where it checks the disk, and then it went on ahead to the login prompt. The other two times it reported "Windows cannot repair your PC." In all cases Clonezilla still says those two partitions are marked dirty and it won't proceed.
Suggestions? Please! If you were me what would you try next? (I've already thought of "Go out for a 12-pack". And I may!)
Thanks very much!
I have had my boss's daughter's laptop at my house all weekend, hoping to solve a bizarre problem I have never seen before for them. Windows 8.0 (I think, I'll get to that later!), HP Pavilion g7 notebook (64 bit, AMD.)
The main symptom is that when the daughter logs in her desktop comes all the way up, wallpaper and tiles and all, and then a second or two later POOF it's gone. Then it reappears, doing the fade-in number as if she had just logged in. Then POOF, gone. Rinse, repeat, as many times as you care to wait for. BUT her husband's login is fine (or so they tell me.) They are both admins.
Difficulty: No desktop for me to work from. Dad only brought me her password, not husband's also. Whole family is gone on vacation, two weeks.
Difficulty 2: first time I have ever touched Win 8.<anything>. My own main machine is Win 7/Mint Linux. Also have what you might call vast experience with XP due to having been an IT guy the last 15 years at a hospital that was basically wall to wall XP (and Dell) on the client side. I have an MSCE cert but it's in XP and Server 2003, and that's increasingly not relevant to anything. And no Win 8 until now.
My first thought was that Windows was probably barfing on something that's loaded at login for her profile but not his. So, safe mode! See if her login is stable with only the minimum loaded. And (since hers is an admin login) also run chkdsk, sfc /scannow, all the usual, with elevated privileges. OK..... MICROSOFT, Where-T-F HAVE YOU PUT SAFE MODE?
Well, I know where it is now but still haven't gotten there. I've found two working ways to an elevated command prompt and made it as far as \windows\system32\ and tried bcdedit. HP's recommended command there is BCDEDIT /SET {DEFAULT} BOOTMENUPOLICY LEGACY and reboot. All that gets me is
"The requested system device cannot be found."
I've also read the eightforums tutorials on bcdedit, every one I can find. While I was in ~\system32\ I wrote down that long identfier string but I haven't dared to try any commands that use it, because of
Difficulty 3: I can't back the system up before I take any chances with it, and I'm very nervous working without that safety net. No access to a working desktop, so I can't use Windows' own backup or make recovery media. (Owners did not make any recovery media, naturally.) I found and downloaded Wolfgang's WinPE Macrium Reflect 5.2 boot CD (large hat tip!) and thrashed around in the BIOS some until I got the system to boot from the CD drive. That's very familiar to me because I've used an earlier Macrium boot CD many times to image my Win7 box. Everything looks right except... It doesn't recognize either of my USB external hard drives so I've got nowhere to put the image. Also tried UBCD4WIN, which I have used hundreds of times to image XP systems. It bluescreens during bootup.
What will recognize my external drives is a Clonezilla Live CD, freshly downloaded, the Ubuntu-based one for AMD64 systems using UEFI boot mode. I thought that was a breakthrough, but it tells me two of the five partitions are marked dirty and won't image them until that's fixed. I have run the Automatic System Repair four times now. Twice it has reached the point where it checks the disk, and then it went on ahead to the login prompt. The other two times it reported "Windows cannot repair your PC." In all cases Clonezilla still says those two partitions are marked dirty and it won't proceed.
Suggestions? Please! If you were me what would you try next? (I've already thought of "Go out for a 12-pack". And I may!)
Thanks very much!
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- many, Apple II DOS through Mint Linux
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- System Manufacturer/Model
- many, all homebuilt
- CPU
- Athlon 64 FX
- Motherboard
- asus m2n-mx se
- Memory
- 4GB
- Graphics Card(s)
- GeForce6
- Browser
- firefox
- Antivirus
- MS security essentials