I had made a recovery boot usb, a cloned recovery partition from the HDD, and a custom .wim snapshot of my HDD. After wiping my HDD to fresh install Windows 8 (I wanted to get rid of 8.1’s shittyness), none of those backups I made were able to communicate with the HDD. I could boot off them into the recovery tools, but none could communicate or install. I tried 2 different Windows 8 discs - One OEM and one Pro. Neither could interface with the HDD either. I tried every single thing I cold think of and googled.
Notably - Installing SATA drivers for the image recovery - Using DISM (.wim deployment) to manually deploy my backup snapshot to the HDD - ‘diskpart’ to manually partition the HDD (this worked partially but previous steps still failed).
I sent this into GeekSquad. I have not had to send anything to anyone for many many years thanks to you guys (Dalans, Tsepesh, off the top of my head). This Windows 8 thing has me stumped completely. Has anyone actually gotten a working clean wipe of an OEM Windows 8 PC to reboot and install a new OS?
I’m not sure I understand the issue…I haven’t had to do anything with Windows 8 thankfully but I see how you can create a recovery partition to a USB drive so I got that bit. What did you use to take the snapshot and was this a full backup or what?
Windows 8 has a built in tool to create a snapshot of everything. Essentially it is a HDD backup stored in a compressed .wim file. The image I made was not recognizable by anything leading me to believe it was corrupted, even those the command prompt stated it was successful. I am just going to blame shitty windows 8 OEM since none of the other backups worked.
Apparently from preliminary diagnostics, Geeksquad says it is a hard drive issue. I don’t know whether it really is or they just can’t figure it out. So no I am going through the manufacture warranty and the Asus laptop warranty for stuff to exploit. So far:
“If service is required: You can contact your local dealer for reseller (place of purchase) for repair/exchange.”
I’m looking over the GeekSquad prot plan now. They said it was a faulty HDD and will replace it but I need to provide the recovery media even though they have access to my serial number for the OEM OS. Derpy… They are not allowed to have blank OS discs. I tried booting from my Win 8 recovery drive and got loads of errors but I’m thinking its only because the hardware profile is different and will not boot due to any machine but my laptop.
Ya. Sadly it is difficult to find top of the line laptops without 8 pre-installed.
I have the fix here for pretty much any installation issue with OEM. Share this around. I sent GeekSquad a MSDN official iso and they just called me saying my cd key worked properly embedded in the efi.
