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Can't restore a tablet with Windows 8.1 with Bing from recovery dr


marcusmx5

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I've been trying to restore my tablet for some time without luck and decided to ask here, perhaps someone has encountered this problem before...

 

I created a bootable recovery usb drive using the "Recovery Drive" tool from Windows some time ago, but now when I boot from it I can't use it to recover my system.

 

The drive has this structure:

- boot

- efi

- sources - in here there are 3 swm files: install.swm1...swm2...swm3 and these 2 files: $PBR_DiskPart and $PBR_ResetConfig

- bootmgr

- bootmgr.efi

- reagent.xml

 

When I boot from the drive, after selecting language and keyboard layout,  I get 3 big buttons: first one allows me to boot to windows, second one to select a drive and the last one to shut down.

 

I select the second one to select a drive and I get:

- UEFI 8.07 - that's the usb drive

- UEFI: CD/DVD Drive - don't have a DVD drive on the tablet

- UEFI: Removable Drive

- UEFI: Network Drive.

 

When I select any of these: "UEFI: 8.07" or "UEFI: Removable Drive", the screen dims a little then the tablet restarts.

 

Is there a way to restore my system? If I can get my hand on a standard windows 8.1 installation disk/usb drive can I use it to restore the system from my recovery drive?

Edited by marcusmx5
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If I can get my hand on a standard windows 8.1 installation disk/usb drive can I use it to restore the system from my recovery drive?

This probably won't work. The recovery environment in Windows 8.1 is edition locked, at least when concerning the desktop editions.

Did your tablet originally come with Windows 8 with Bing or Windows 8.1 with Bing?

Can you still boot into Windows?

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Thank You for your response, 

 

The tablet had Windows 8.1 with Bing and I can't boot into it anymore. I booted the tablet using a regular windows 8.1 installation drive just to check if at least the recovery partition is still there and saw that all partitions are gone.

 

AFAIK, my alternatives right now are either figure out a way to use the recovery drive or somehow extract the product key from the swm images and do a fresh install, assuming I can find a installation image for Win 8.1 with Bing. 

 

Is there a way to restore the swm image files on the internal drive?

Edited by marcusmx5
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Is there a way to restore the swm image files on the internal drive?

Boot the Win8 install media, press shift F10 and run dism to apply the image

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824910.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj980032(v=winembedded.81).aspx

However: which hardware do you use? Doe sthe manufacturer used Wimboot?

https://blogs.windows.com/itpro/2014/04/10/what-is-windows-image-boot-wimboot/

Which file size matches your swm files?

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I don't have advice to offer, but keep in mind a Recovery Drive only has enough stuff on it to boot / restore an OS that's been corrupted logically (but is still mostly intact).  Since you mention the partitions are gone, that hints at a more serious issue, such as drive failure.  If you haven't done another form of backup your data files and applications may unfortunately be long gone.

 

-Noel

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I don't have advice to offer, but keep in mind a Recovery Drive only has enough stuff on it to boot / restore an OS that's been corrupted logically (but is still mostly intact).  Since you mention the partitions are gone, that hints at a more serious issue, such as drive failure.  If you haven't done another form of backup your data files and applications may unfortunately be long gone.

 

-Noel

Not really-really.

A "Recovery Drive" which has install.swm's is a (poor) replacement for the actual install DVD.

If you prefer, there are two kinds of Windows 8/8.1 "Recovery Drives" one which contains only the boot.wim, and one that contains both the boot.wim and the install.wim (or the "partial" install.swm files).

It seems that here we have a "third case", with install.swm's and no boot.img :unsure:

 

 

@marcusmx5

I created a bootable recovery usb drive using the "Recovery Drive" tool from Windows some time ago, but now when I boot from it I can't use it to recover my system.

 

 

...

 

When I boot from the drive, after selecting language and keyboard layout,  I get 3 big buttons: first one allows me to boot to windows, second one to select a drive and the last one to shut down.

 

I select the second one to select a drive and I get:

...

 

 

 

 

 

And what happens if you select the first one?

 

Which EXACT make/model of tablet is it?

 

Each OEM may have introduced one or more changes to the way the "recovery drive" (or the "recovery partition") are created and or should be restored, as an example (related to a Windows 7) Toshiba specifically needed a couple tricks:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/155075-make-a-recovery-disc-from-a-toshiba-recovery-partition/

 

jaclaz

 

Edited by jaclaz
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And what happens if you select the first one?

 

Which EXACT make/model of tablet is it?

 

Each OEM may have introduced one or more changes to the way the "recovery drive" (or the "recovery partition") are created and or should be restored, as an example (related to a Windows 7) Toshiba specifically needed a couple tricks:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/155075-make-a-recovery-disc-from-a-toshiba-recovery-partition/

 

jaclaz

 

 

 

When I selected the first option, it just froze.

 

The tablet's make and model are Allview WI10N (a rebranded import from some unknown chinese OEM).

 

In the end I got my hands on another tablet and used a ubuntu usb drive to do a complete image of it's ssd (mmcblk0) using the "dd" command then dumped it on my tablet. It seemed to have worked, my device appears to be ok so far.

 

After taking a look at it's partitions I noticed that the "C" drive is flagged as "Wim Boot". Could it be possible that Microsoft's own recovery tools might not be compatible with Wim Boot?

Edited by marcusmx5
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The tablet's make and model are Allview WI10N (a rebranded import from some unknown chinese OEM).

Hmmm, never heard about that. :(

 

In the end I got my hands on another tablet and used a ubuntu usb drive to do a complete image of it's ssd (mmcblk0) using the "dd" command then dumped it on my tablet. It seemed to have worked, my device appears to be ok so far.

 

After taking a look at it's partitions I noticed that the "C" drive is flagged as "Wim Boot". Could it be possible that Microsoft's own recovery tools might not be compatible with Wim Boot?

Well, you never know. :no:

As a matter of fact the WIMBOOT (or WOF driver) is something that has been added in Windows 8.1, basically it is a "simple" enough approach, it is a kernel driver that can interpret a .wim file as if it was already an applied volume, so it does not in itself constitute anything particularly "complex" to deal with.

But we are still in the earlier misunderstanding.

Microsoft advocates the use of a "recovery environment" which is based on a "normal" .wim, the WinRE.wim, starting from Vista, the situation AFAIK is/was the following:

  • with Vista the method was recommended but very few OEM used it
  • with 7 it was strongly recommended and a few OEM's ditched their own "custom" recovery environment and adopted the MS way
  • starting with 8 the "recovery environment" became mandatory

still they are two different things, one is the "recovery environment" (which is a kind of "built-in PE") and one is the "recovery partition" or the "recovery media" that you can create on DVD(s) or on a USB stick.

 

What is now compulsory is the presence of the WinRE, the OEM is free to use the Recovery Environment to apply/restore the mass storage device to "factory state" but remains free to  use a completely different, custom, approach to obtain the same.

 

A number of low-cost/small SSD sized tablets may use Wimboot lately  as the advantage it has is that the senseless amount of bloat a Windows install represents is strongly reduced due to the WIM format compression, though this only works initially as each and every subsequent update is going to be stored "flat" on the device (and it seems like the functionality will be removed in Windows 10), see:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173786-whats-up-with-the-bevy-of-optional-windows-81-updates/

 

From the contents of the USB drive you have, it does seem like a "normal" install/recovery, probably aimed to be saved on both DVD's and USB stick, if you check the size of the .swm's they should be compatible with DVD sizes, the presence of the reagent.xml file is "standard MS", while $PBR_DiskPart and $PBR_ResetConfig are "non-standard" AFAIK.

So it is possible that the USB stick you have is a "mixed mode" making use partially of the MS approach and partially on some OEM customizations, the presence of the reagent.xml file implies the use of a WinRE.wim that seemingly you do not have, maybe from it's contents one could try to understand what has "gone wrong":

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=587

 

jaclaz

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if you check the size of the .swm's they should be compatible with DVD sizes

 

In fact the recovery partition contains a single .wim file which is divided to .swm files on the USB stick because it has a FAT32 file system (the 4 GB limit). I too investigated the possibility of transferring the recovery partition to a USB stick and I have three things to say:

1. The recovery partition is supposed to be used by an OEM recovery program (e.g. Lenovo One Key Recovery).

2. The OEM program may in fact not be able to use the recovery partition from the USB stick due to inherent limitations (the mentioned one is an example of this).

3. Even if you can't use the OEM recovery program (for whatever reason) you can use dism to do the job as cdob wrote. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

 

The tablet's make and model are Allview WI10N (a rebranded import from some unknown chinese OEM).

Hmmm, never heard about that. :(

 

In the end I got my hands on another tablet and used a ubuntu usb drive to do a complete image of it's ssd (mmcblk0) using the "dd" command then dumped it on my tablet. It seemed to have worked, my device appears to be ok so far.

 

After taking a look at it's partitions I noticed that the "C" drive is flagged as "Wim Boot". Could it be possible that Microsoft's own recovery tools might not be compatible with Wim Boot?

Well, you never know. :no:

As a matter of fact the WIMBOOT (or WOF driver) is something that has been added in Windows 8.1, basically it is a "simple" enough approach, it is a kernel driver that can interpret a .wim file as if it was already an applied volume, so it does not in itself constitute anything particularly "complex" to deal with.

But we are still in the earlier misunderstanding.

Microsoft advocates the use of a "recovery environment" which is based on a "normal" .wim, the WinRE.wim, starting from Vista, the situation AFAIK is/was the following:

  • with Vista the method was recommended but very few OEM used it
  • with 7 it was strongly recommended and a few OEM's ditched their own "custom" recovery environment and adopted the MS way
  • starting with 8 the "recovery environment" became mandatory

still they are two different things, one is the "recovery environment" (which is a kind of "built-in PE") and one is the "recovery partition" or the "recovery media" that you can create on DVD(s) or on a USB stick.

 

What is now compulsory is the presence of the WinRE, the OEM is free to use the Recovery Environment to apply/restore the mass storage device to "factory state" but remains free to  use a completely different, custom, approach to obtain the same.

 

A number of low-cost/small SSD sized tablets may use Wimboot lately  as the advantage it has is that the senseless amount of bloat a Windows install represents is strongly reduced due to the WIM format compression, though this only works initially as each and every subsequent update is going to be stored "flat" on the device (and it seems like the functionality will be removed in Windows 10), see:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173786-whats-up-with-the-bevy-of-optional-windows-81-updates/

 

From the contents of the USB drive you have, it does seem like a "normal" install/recovery, probably aimed to be saved on both DVD's and USB stick, if you check the size of the .swm's they should be compatible with DVD sizes, the presence of the reagent.xml file is "standard MS", while $PBR_DiskPart and $PBR_ResetConfig are "non-standard" AFAIK.

So it is possible that the USB stick you have is a "mixed mode" making use partially of the MS approach and partially on some OEM customizations, the presence of the reagent.xml file implies the use of a WinRE.wim that seemingly you do not have, maybe from it's contents one could try to understand what has "gone wrong":

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=587

 

jaclaz

 

 

Couldn't one take a wim of the system, say after 1 month of updates, and replace the wimboot wim with the new image?  

 

I'm not sure if that would be possible or not, as I only just learned about the wimboot option within the past month and thought it was a horrible idea (great concept, horrible idea)... tablets are already slow enough, and even with an ssd it's still going to take a significant performance hit because of wimboot.  Then again, I'm probably in the minority, as I've gotten extremely used to the fast performance of my M18x.

Edited by jmonroe0914
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Thank You for your response, 

 

The tablet had Windows 8.1 with Bing and I can't boot into it anymore. I booted the tablet using a regular windows 8.1 installation drive just to check if at least the recovery partition is still there and saw that all partitions are gone.

 

AFAIK, my alternatives right now are either figure out a way to use the recovery drive or somehow extract the product key from the swm images and do a fresh install, assuming I can find a installation image for Win 8.1 with Bing. 

 

Is there a way to restore the swm image files on the internal drive?

 

As others have mentioned, if you're going to take the time to make a recovery disk, you might as well simply wim the entire partition.  It should take roughly the same amount of time, and depending on the size of your ssd, you may even be able to replace whatever is on the recovery drive with the wim you created (using maximum compression).  It takes ~75 min/per 100GB on my system using maximum compression for a total of ~ 4 hrs to WIM ~ 350GB data on my system partition.

 

If you're interested, this is a great tutorial on creating your own custom WinPE/RE image: http://reboot.pro/topic/19156-create-a-bootable-winpe-50-x64-usb-drive/

 

DISM Capture Command:

dism /Capture-Image /ImageFile:E:\Recovery\Windows81x64_Base.wim /CaptureDir:C:\ /Name:"Windows81x64_Base" /compress:max /norpfix /checkintegrity /verify /scratchdir:D:\scratch

The scratch directory is vital as WinPE/RE only has a couple of hundred MB set aside for scratch, and it will fail if it runs out of scratch. I generally point it to my second internal hdd, however if you're using an external drive to save the image, you can also set that for scratch. I usually create a folder named scratch because there's tens of temp files that are created. CheckIntegrity and Verify both add significant time to the capture and restore process, and you can get away with not using them (though it's best practice to use them and is why it takes ~75mins/per 100GB for me).

 

DISM Apply command:

dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:E:\Recovery\Windows81x64_Base.wim /index:1 /ApplyDir:C:\ /checkintegrity /verify /scratchdir:D:\scratch
Edited by jmonroe0914
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