Booting into windows 8.1 64 bit Blank screen flashing underscore

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Justin213141

Reputable
Oct 15, 2014
2
0
4,510
Hello there
Recently I was on my computer when I saw a notification that read something along the lines of: this computer will restart in 1 min (for windows update), when all of a sudden my computer had a BSOD. Upon rebooting the computer, I find that after usual BIOS has finished, I'm left with a flashing underscore that goes nowhere. Reading forums I created a recovery usb off another laptop with windows 8, however, I find that I am unable to refresh my PC, System Restore, System Image Recovery or Automatic Repair: "This option is not supporte on the operating system you've selected", and I am also unable to Reset my PC "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing". I found that upon entering CMD, I tried to follow the instructions here, however upon entering the correct partition for Windows, I was unable to navigate to C:\Windows via CMD controls (cd Windows) - The system cannot find the path specified.
I am currently running off a intel i7 920, ASUS P6T motherboard, Gigabyte Radeon 4890 GPU, sufficient PSU, 8BG DDR3 RAM
Thanks for taking the effort to read this
 
Solution
J
basically the effect of the fix would be to re assign your drive letter of your drive back to the original drive letter
"c:"

so, now when you boot off of a image what drive is your windows on?
(it should be c:\ )
you would want to make sure that none of the reserved partitions have a assigned drive letter
and if you have 2 drives both with primary partitions that you only mark one drive as the active primary partition and
that drive has your bootloader on its reserved partiton AND the active primary should be assigned the C letter.

(all the drive letters are reasigned when a second drive with a primary partiton is added)

mostly you will end up using the commands
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /scanos...
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J

johnbl

Polypheme
Nov 4, 2012
10,072
185
67,090
cool, boot into BIOS and see if you drive is still detected.
if that is ok, you want to boot a image and see if your drive partition had been re assigned a new drive letter.

you may find that your c:\windows\system32
is now at D:\winodws\system32

this is happens a lot when certain utilities are run or another bootable device is plugged into the system.
the system scans your drives and finds your un labeled reserved partition and assigns a drive letter to it, because it is generally the first partition on your boot device it gets drive c: and you main boot volume gets assigned drive D or sometimes E:

so if your drive is still working you want to re assign the drive letters.

you can do that with a boot image of windows and do a repair
or you can do a manual fix. let me see if I can find a link with the correct commands
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392
might work for a manual repair.
 
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J

Justin213141

Reputable
Oct 15, 2014
2
0
4,510


Thanks for your reply
I found that my system drive has actually moved to E:
However, upon attempting the manual fix, and restarting, I found that I'm still stuck on the blinking underscore upon boot
 
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J

johnbl

Polypheme
Nov 4, 2012
10,072
185
67,090
basically the effect of the fix would be to re assign your drive letter of your drive back to the original drive letter
"c:"

so, now when you boot off of a image what drive is your windows on?
(it should be c:\ )
you would want to make sure that none of the reserved partitions have a assigned drive letter
and if you have 2 drives both with primary partitions that you only mark one drive as the active primary partition and
that drive has your bootloader on its reserved partiton AND the active primary should be assigned the C letter.

(all the drive letters are reasigned when a second drive with a primary partiton is added)

mostly you will end up using the commands
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /scanos
bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd

for the most part if you run this sequence it covers most of the error conditions you could have.



 
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