Win 8.1 won't boot - system partition is "hidden"

[Haole Boy]

Aloha,

A customer gave me her laptop that suddenly stopped booting. No idea what happened, her husband also worked on it for several days before giving it to me. Hard drive works, I can see it booting from WinPE and Partition Magic. Windows startup repair runs, but it fails.

I noticed that when I looked at the drive when booted with WinPE, the Windows partition does not show up in Explorer. Went to Disk Management to try and assign a drive letter, but when I right-click on the partition all of the options are greyed out.

Opened a command prompt, and ran DISKPART with the following results: (the disk / partition in question highlighted in red)

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 465 GB 128 MB *
Disk 1 Online 18 GB 1024 KB *
Disk 2 Online 58 GB 0 B
Disk 3 Online 3072 KB 0 B

DISKPART> list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 C ESP FAT32 Partition 300 MB Healthy
Volume 2 Acer NTFS Partition 464 GB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 E NTFS Partition 450 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 4 Y E2B NTFS Removable 58 GB Healthy

Note that Volume 2 (which is the Windows partition) has no drive letter assigned and is marked as "Hidden"
I tried to un-hide it this way:

DISKPART> select volume 2

Volume 2 is the selected volume.

DISKPART> list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 C ESP FAT32 Partition 300 MB Healthy
* Volume 2 Acer NTFS Partition 464 GB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 E NTFS Partition 450 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 4 Y E2B NTFS Removable 58 GB Healthy
Volume 5 FAKEDISK FAT Partition 1984 KB Healthy

DISKPART> attributes volume clear hidden

Virtual Disk Service error:
The object is not found.

It's getting close to midnight and my brain is fried... any help someone can give would be greatly appreciated.

Mahalo,

Harry Z.

 

[Markverhyden]

Have you tried to parted magic?

 

[Haole Boy]

Have you tried to parted magic?

Sorry, should have included this info. Parted Magic does not show the partition as "hidden". I do not understand this...

 

[Markverhyden]

Sorry, should have included this info. Parted Magic does not show the partition as "hidden". I do not understand this...

Hmm.... Odd. I have a vague recollection of running into a situation years ago like this but do not remember the details. One thing to try is toggle the hidden status using PM. Hide it, reboot, then unhide it.

 

[Easy PC]

I have come across this a few times in Windows 8.1, usually when the machine has been upgraded from Windows 8. I have just reloaded the O/S.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Corrupted partition table perhaps? Maybe DMDE can restore it from the backup, although I've never tried it. I'd give AOMEI and/or EASEUS partition managers and see if they have any better luck.

 

[Haole Boy]

I have come across this a few times in Windows 8.1, usually when the machine has been upgraded from Windows 8. I have just reloaded the O/S.

Thanks for the reply, Easy PC and Larry Sabo

I decided to 'start over' and restored all the partitions from backup. Then tried to do a Refresh. got message "The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again"

A Reset results in: Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing.

Did some searching on these symptoms and found some diskpart commands to display the partitions. The Windows partition was showing up as 'RAW'. Assigned a drive letter to it and am now running chkdsk /r on it. Looks like that's finding all sorts of errors, will take many hours to finish. Will update later tonight or tomorrow.

Mahalo to all of you for your suggestions.

Harry Z.

 

[Markverhyden]

If you are getting tons of errors with checkdisk most likely the partition is corrupted and will not work properly. Hopefully there is no data needed as it is probably unrecoverable at this point.

 

[Haole Boy]

If you are getting tons of errors with checkdisk most likely the partition is corrupted and will not work properly. Hopefully there is no data needed as it is probably unrecoverable at this point.

Yeah, at this point I just want to do a reset. This is an Acer and they do not appear to offer a Win 8.1 install DVD option (at least I can't find it on their website..)

 

[glennd]

we

now running chkdsk /r

well, that's the end of that!

 

[Haole Boy]

To close the loop on this one... Ended up using PartedMagic to delete all the partitions on the drive, and then restored from the disk image I created with I received the machine. I use Drive Snapshot, and the first step in the restore process is to restore the partition structure. When I did this it came up with a warning that there was not enough space on the drive! Took the option to restore the structure as best as possible and started restoring the individual partitions

When I got to the partition at the end of the disk, I got an error saying that the partition was not big enough by 5 MB. Rebooted to PartedMagic again and the last partition was 445MB, and also found 5 MB at the end of the disk that was "unallocated". Tried to resize the last partition, but that failed. Deleted the partition and redefined it as 450MB and that worked!

Restored the last partition, and it boots! Whoo-hoo!

I think the original problem was that something got corrupted in the internal drive tables (not sure if MFT is correct parlance with a GPT disk...). So, what I want to do now is a create a Recovery Disk and reset Windows. Now I'm getting the "Can't create a recovery disk, files are missing" problem. This machine was upgraded to 8.1 from 8.0 and I've read where this sometimes causes this problem with creating the recovery disk.

Acer wants $50 for the install DVD ($20 for the DVD and $30 for shipping)... I'd rather not pay that.. sigh... enough for one day.

Mahalo for all of your assistance.

 

[TechLady]

Tell us what the model of the Acer is...you might get lucky and one of us might have one in the shop and could send you a disc.

 

[Haole Boy]

Tell us what the model of the Acer is...you might get lucky and one of us might have one in the shop and could send you a disc.

Great idea TechLady! It's an Acer Aspire M5 series. Model M5-481PT-6644

Mahalo!

 

[Haole Boy]

Maybe (hopefully) my last post on this issue... When I finally got the machine to boot, it went to the Updating Windows screen, then the Update Failed and backing out the changes, and finally booted up successfully. When I went to shut it down, I noticed that there were updates pending, so I looked in Windows Update, and lo, and behold, Windows 10 is the update that is pending! Not too surprising, but I'm still trying to understand what messed up the partitions. Is it possible that Win 10 altered the partition setup (and then did not undo it correctly)? Haven't found anything about Win 10 altering partitions on the web.

Mahalo!