Desktop Operating Systems and Recovery

This is a one-piece desktop computer and with power on it goes to "Preparing Automatic Repair".  On failing, it shows "Your PC did not start correctly."  Selecting Restart just repeats the sequence as before.  Selecting “Advanced”, I get options "Continue" and “Turn off the PC", neither of which is helpful.  The next option is to "Use a Device" to recover, but selecting that never offers devices, rather does a restart, and back to "Preparing Automatic Repair" and so on.

The fourth option is "Troubleshoot" which offers to reset the PC (yet again) and "Advanced Options".  Selecting that, "System Restore" takes me back to “Preparing…” as above, with no offer of drives for recovery.  Also offered is "Command Prompt" which works!  (Starting in 1983 I used MSDOS a lot.)  

At the prompt, I see it comes up in drive X.  Drive X is named “Boot” and has a lot of Windows folders, similar to what is on C (which thankfully looks intact).  However, the files on X are not the same as on C.  Drive D, as expected, is a recovery partition, for whatever good that may do me.  Drive C has 945 megabytes free and with whatever is partitioned for D, this pretty much accounts for the one terabyte hard drive. 

But then there’s drive X.  In just its System32 folder are 450 megs of data, and it shows 500 megs free.  I’ve had the back off, and there are no hidden hard drives!  No network is connected to the computer.

I had done her recovery to an SD card, but now the PC won't find it.  I went through every letter, no luck.  Today (on my computer) I copied the SD card to a USB thumb drive and I can read that using the command line, but I don't find an "EXE" to run.

Another choice in “Advanced Options” is "UEFI Firmware Settings."  Here I can get into the BIOS and I ran the hardware test.  After three hours it passed all tests.  Then I tried the optical drive read test with a known CD and it doesn't exactly fail, but insists that I use a nonblank disk, which I did.  I'd say it isn't working.  The UEFI offers a restore option and asks for the source device.  Then it goes back to “Preparing…” yet again.

The option for "System Image Recovery" finds no image anywhere in the computer.

"Startup Settings" allows me to select a change in startup configuration, like safe mode.  Then it goes back to “Preparing…” as before.  “Startup Repair” does the same.

"System Restore" looked promising, since it started running and restoring for about a half hour.  Then it popped up with “System Restore did not complete successfully” and “The restore point was damaged or was deleted during restore.”  It does offer that I can “try an advanced recovery method”.  Been there, done that.

I did a load test on the 19 volt power supply at 4 amps and it's solid and clean.

I suspect the problem involves drive X, although I don't know where it is! 

I really hope someone reads this and says “Oh!  I know! You need to…”.

Dave