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Crash on Update.... Restore?

N

Ninjahedge

Diamond Member
OK,

Basic story, my wife decided the update was taking too long, so she interrupted it and rebooted it on her laptop.

CRASH

The only option that kept coming up was an ASUS reconstruct. I (erroneously) chose to install Windows on "1 partition" thinking it knew the partition and would just overwrite windows on it (keeping much data on the other partition).

No. It borked it. I will have to double check to make sure that it did repartition and just did not MAP the other partition, but still.


Now, the questions I have are like this:

1. Is there any way to make a recovery-stick for the USB port? I know there are ways, but I do not know how to make one. I am not sure my wife got a W7 disk with her machine that could make one.

2. Will making a full backup of the drive (on the server) help prevent this in the future? Is there a way to ghost it and reconstruct it after-crash?

3. Is there any way to check for the data that may have been de-mapped but not lost?

4. Was there any way to avoid this bork (short of NOT REBOOTING MID-UPDATE!)?


TiA
 
"CRASH" is colorful but not very descriptive. First: what flavor of Asus are you referring to? Exactly what errors occured when you first tried to reboot after the failed update? Were you unable to access the F8 startup repair option, or unable to boot into safe mode, before you decided to do the Asus restore?

.
 
Thanks B, I will get the stats on the machine when I get home tonight (last night it was "Run to PC Richards to get AC to replace broken one during heat wave" night).

What happened was that when the machine is being restarted, you got the choice screen... bootup normally or go debug.

I tried going "normal", it would go through two title screens (with one being very basic, and the second looking like an alternate Windows start screen... hard to describe. Basic logo, black screen, green "night rider" bar at the bottom swishing past).

It would then blank out, and start running an ASUS recovery scheme, asking whether I wanted to restore it on one partition, two partitions, etc etc.

I erroneously thought that "restoring" it on one partition would leave the other be... what it meant was that it would re-partition the drive and install the OS on one partition rather than having two... I will check the original bill of sale to see how many gigs the HD was... hopefully it just did not map the other partition and I can get the data (I do not think so, but I will double check).

The question now is, damage done. How can we get back some of the data that was on the drive (especially her work stuff). Any program rec's? Do I need to pop this open and hook it up externally to do it or can it stay in her machine?

Also, how can I guard against this in the future? With no disk drive I am showing my age. Could I simply get an external USB drive and make a bootable backup on that? If so, what would be the best way or program to use for that?

TIA!
 
It wouldn't be much more that a guessing game until I can take a peek at the service or user manual, so get those specs posted. I will say that the likelihood of recovering data is probably good, and you might end up lucky and only need to rebuild the BCD. But again, without the specs it's just conjecture.
 
Ninjahedge said:
Bubble, here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...productDetails

One good thing, I think I only see 186G on explorer.... That either means she got a cheaper option package, or there is about 300G unaccounted for.

Any way to re-assign/attach an "unused" partition? (Disk Manager?)
Click to expand...

You can download the ISO of whichever Windows 7 version you need from here: http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=32979735&postcount=3. Now, use Josh Cell's WinUSB Maker for a really easy way to create bootable USB Windows installation media that behaves just like a DVD. Then boot from the USB stick to access the repair options in the Windows Recovery Environment, as denis280 suggested. In the advanced repair tools run diskpart from the command prompt to find out the info on the disk. It's probably easiest to boot the USB stick by selecting it from the Boot menu when you startup. Here's the Windows 7 UX32VD User Manual.

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