How can I boot from my recovery partition?

[Arter]

Hello,

My last windows update went haywire and left me unbootable. I ran a live linux distro off an SD card to retrieve my HDD data, then decided it was time for a reformat/fresh windows 7 install. However, the factory reset process in my Gateway laptop failed a couple of times, and then the third try I would get stuck at a bootloader error and was thoroughly screwed.

So I burned a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 (correct) cd to an SD card and used that to boot, formatted the HDD and installed a fresh clean Windows 7.

Unfortunately the sticker on my laptop is worn out and while it's 99% legible Windows isn't accepting it. I went into trial mode, and realized I was also missing a ton of drivers and whatnot.

I know that installing through the recovery partition, while full of bloatware, I get my Windows product key and proper activation, as well as all the drivers and stuff I need.... F8 into startup repair doesn't help, and instead starts a recovery process on C:, not X:.

When I try Gateway's alt-F10 keysmosh it stops halfway through "loading files" and I get "An unexpected I/O error has occurred," 0xc00000e9

Any help would be very much appreciated!

 

[hedwar2011]

Hello,

My last windows update went haywire and left me unbootable. I ran a live linux distro off an SD card to retrieve my HDD data, then decided it was time for a reformat/fresh windows 7 install. However, the factory reset process in my Gateway laptop failed a couple of times, and then the third try I would get stuck at a bootloader error and was thoroughly screwed.

So I burned a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 (correct) cd to an SD card and used that to boot, formatted the HDD and installed a fresh clean Windows 7.

Unfortunately the sticker on my laptop is worn out and while it's 99% legible Windows isn't accepting it. I went into trial mode, and realized I was also missing a ton of drivers and whatnot.

I know that installing through the recovery partition, while full of bloatware, I get my Windows product key and proper activation, as well as all the drivers and stuff I need.... F8 into startup repair doesn't help, and instead starts a recovery process on C:, not X:.

When I try Gateway's alt-F10 keysmosh it stops halfway through "loading files" and I get "An unexpected I/O error has occurred," 0xc00000e9

Any help would be very much appreciated!

That typically is a result of the MBR file associated with the recovery partition being rewritten by either the clean installation you did using the CD or by partition table corruption.

If you are getting error messages from the word go (which I see you attempted to run it prior to the clean reinstall) and even after the recovery process completed, it stands to reason that the image itself is either no good or something else is going wrong with the computer.

What make/model of Gateway laptop is this?

Have you attempted to run HDD diagnostics of any sort on the computer? A I/O error could be a source of a bad head on the drive.

Here are a couple of links that might come in handy for you:
How Do I Test My Hard Drive for Problems?

7 Free Hard Drive Testing Programs

Let me know if this helps or not and we can go from there.

 

[Arter]

I ran chkdsk and didn't get any results. It's an ID49C01h from Gateway, just over a couple years old (so out of warranty and not available for gateway chat support).