C
Conor12
I have an Asus laptop with an SSD containing a Windows 10 installation and a hard drive containing both a data partition for Windows and an Ubuntu 16 installation. Earlier this week while traveling my battery ran out while I was using Windows and the computer automatically shut down. When I got home, recharged, and tried to boot back in to Windows I was no longer able to log in. I'm able to boot Windows and the normal welcome screen loads and shows the time:
When I click or press a key it moves into the blurred-background state where the password, pin, or fingerprint login credential prompt would usually be shown, but none of the above appear - although the networking, accessibility, and power icons do show up in the bottom right. Most of the time my account information does not appear either:
Occasionally, my account icon and use name do show up - it's not clear to me what causes this to occur or not, but it doesn't seem to have any actual impact on the response of the system to my input:
The normal menus will show up if I click on any of the three icons at the bottom right, although selecting options from within the menus has no effect other than causing the display to freeze and be unresponsive to continued input for several minutes before reverting to the first version above with the time, at which point I can click again to get back to the 3-icon screen.
I am able to restart and get into the recovery options menu if I hold shift while clicking restart and wait (while still holding shift) for about 5 minutes. However, none of the options in the recovery menu actually work at present. If I try to use the cmd prompt, to uninstall recent updates, to restore a previously saved image, or to reinstall windows I get an 80070013 error code and a prompt to restart:
However, restarting boots windows like normal (not into the recovery environment), even if I hold down shift for the duration of the boot, and restarting from there back into the recovery environment gets me back to the drawing board (repeated attempts to use any of these options don't change the result). Googling the error, it sounds like there's some kind of driver conflict, either with an update trying to install a driver I already have, or trying to install a driver that is not compatible with my hardware? But not sure what I can do about this if I can't roll back updates.
Booting into safe mode via the recovery menu also doesn't work. When I select the option Startup Settings -> restart it also just restarts with a normal Windows boot (not into safe mode or a menu in which I can choose startup settings).
I tried making a Windows recovery flash drive using my Ubuntu installation (which at present I can still access). I followed the instructions here using a Windows image from here. I formatted it as GPT with an NTFS partition containing the image volume contents. The UEFI menu detects that a flash drive is plugged in but doesn't recognize it as a bootable device.
I think the central problem is something to do with Windows being in an unsafe hibernation state following that initial running-out-of-power shutdown, so that I can't log in (because the system was left in a halfway? logged in state). If I try to mount the windows data partition ('C:') from within Ubuntu I get an error stating that it is in a hibernated state and can only be mounted as read-only.
I was able to read-only mount the drive in Ubuntu though and have extracted everything I think I really care about on it. At this point I would be fine with reinstalling windows or doing a clean wipe and reinstall of that entire drive if that were necessary, but I can't figure out a good option to do this since the recovery mode options aren't working and the UEFI menu won't detect a recovery drive.
Any thoughts on what to try from here?
Thanks!
Continue reading...
When I click or press a key it moves into the blurred-background state where the password, pin, or fingerprint login credential prompt would usually be shown, but none of the above appear - although the networking, accessibility, and power icons do show up in the bottom right. Most of the time my account information does not appear either:
Occasionally, my account icon and use name do show up - it's not clear to me what causes this to occur or not, but it doesn't seem to have any actual impact on the response of the system to my input:
The normal menus will show up if I click on any of the three icons at the bottom right, although selecting options from within the menus has no effect other than causing the display to freeze and be unresponsive to continued input for several minutes before reverting to the first version above with the time, at which point I can click again to get back to the 3-icon screen.
I am able to restart and get into the recovery options menu if I hold shift while clicking restart and wait (while still holding shift) for about 5 minutes. However, none of the options in the recovery menu actually work at present. If I try to use the cmd prompt, to uninstall recent updates, to restore a previously saved image, or to reinstall windows I get an 80070013 error code and a prompt to restart:
However, restarting boots windows like normal (not into the recovery environment), even if I hold down shift for the duration of the boot, and restarting from there back into the recovery environment gets me back to the drawing board (repeated attempts to use any of these options don't change the result). Googling the error, it sounds like there's some kind of driver conflict, either with an update trying to install a driver I already have, or trying to install a driver that is not compatible with my hardware? But not sure what I can do about this if I can't roll back updates.
Booting into safe mode via the recovery menu also doesn't work. When I select the option Startup Settings -> restart it also just restarts with a normal Windows boot (not into safe mode or a menu in which I can choose startup settings).
I tried making a Windows recovery flash drive using my Ubuntu installation (which at present I can still access). I followed the instructions here using a Windows image from here. I formatted it as GPT with an NTFS partition containing the image volume contents. The UEFI menu detects that a flash drive is plugged in but doesn't recognize it as a bootable device.
I think the central problem is something to do with Windows being in an unsafe hibernation state following that initial running-out-of-power shutdown, so that I can't log in (because the system was left in a halfway? logged in state). If I try to mount the windows data partition ('C:') from within Ubuntu I get an error stating that it is in a hibernated state and can only be mounted as read-only.
I was able to read-only mount the drive in Ubuntu though and have extracted everything I think I really care about on it. At this point I would be fine with reinstalling windows or doing a clean wipe and reinstall of that entire drive if that were necessary, but I can't figure out a good option to do this since the recovery mode options aren't working and the UEFI menu won't detect a recovery drive.
Any thoughts on what to try from here?
Thanks!
Continue reading...