Envy 15-j059nr wouldn't boot to windows after win10 update now the hard drive is missing

[AggieFan378]

This system was running Windows 8.1 before it was upgraded to Windows 10 last year. It's my boyfriends computer and last night he kept getting the dreaded blue screen with errors regarding his hard disk. He kept ignoring them. Then, his computer battery died and when he booted back up, it would get to a blue screen and act like it was going to repair itself and would just start all over again. It was going in a loop. He had no idea what he was doing, but searched the Internet and ended up messing everything up even more.

His setup was 850 GB HD in 3 partitions, It was set up as a Raid one was the main  C drive, one was the restore drive and the other was cache. He changed them to non-raid drives. He changed some other things in the bios too, but I am not sure exactly what.

The problelm I have at this moment is that when I boot up without the USB Bootable media I created, I get stuck at a screen that says there is no boot disk and no operating system installed, and to press F2 to run Diagnostics. When I run teh diagnostics, everything is fine, no errors.

When I try to recover, repair, reimage, or anything other than reinstall, it goes back to the screen I mentioned above that will not allow me to do anything, with the exception of going to the command prompt, which is  X and not C. I did a dir/w and saw that the windows files are there, but under the users directory, all the documents and pictures are empty,so not sure if it is even looking at what I think it is.

When I choose to Install Windows 10, everything is going smooth, then bam, it wants the drivers. I cannot find drivers for this laptop that don't have the .exe and require setup. This laptop doesn't have a CD/DVD drive on it. I don't mind doing a reformat and starting all over, if I could retrieve his pictures off of his hard disk drive. They are of his late grandfather.

Please help! 

Thank you in advance!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

See if there is a BIOS setting to change the USB 3 ports to auto (to emulate USB 2 ports).  Windows may be looking for a USB3 driver.

To save any previous files, do not format the drive.  Just let Windows install over the current windows directory on C:\ and it will create a Windows.old folder.

After W10 has completed installing, you can explore the Windows.old folder and retrieve any files from the Windows.old user directory that you need.

You can delete the Windows.old folder after you are sure you got everthing from it that you need.

Use the disk cleanup utility to delete the Windows.old folder.

You run the utility.  It opens to the window, then click on the cleanup system files button on the lower left side of the window.  The disk cleanup utility will run again and then when you get to the window, you can check all of the boxes to delete the unnecessary files, including the Windows.old folder.

[AggieFan378]

Thank you for your reply. The drives were all messed up. I have no idea what all he did to this poor computer. It went from a 850 GB to now only having 44GB on C drive and then having a recovery parptition of not even 1 GB and another partition not even that big. I have no idea where the other went. Windows did install and was running great. I just can't figure out where the other partition went.

Now, I have a new and horrific problem. I found several things that said to update the bios, and it said it was successful, but when the computer rebooted all I got was a black screen.

I tried all of these things:

1) holding down the Windows and B keys while pressing the Power key

Results: No beeping, still black screen, no activity at all. I do see a red light on the F12 key (wireless) and a white light on the side by the card reader)

2) I made a USB to reset the bios to its previous one, doing the same Windows + B and power button as above, but the USB is not lighting up like it did earlier.

Results: No beeping. Still black screen, no activity at all. I do see a red light on the F12 key (wireless) and the white light on the side by the card reader

3)I removed the battery and the plug for 20 minutes and then tried again. 

Results: Nothing still.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome.

Unfortunately, I woudn't be able to help you with that.

I fear that the PC is now a useless paperweight due to the failed BIOS update.  Usually there is no remedy other than to replace the motherboard.

Hopefully, you were able to retrieve the files before that happened, and if not, get a SATA to USB adapter cable, and read the hard drive on another PC.