I've broken my Windows 8.1 machine....

[Dalian Blue]

OK, I use Mac OS X or Debian Linux for business but sometimes I have to use Windows machines as some of the applications I use are only available for Windows and don't work very well in VMs. Anyway, around a month or so ago I bought a Windows 8.1 machine, gradually got more and more frustrated with 8.1 and yesterday I decided to dual boot it with Debian. Debian works fine but today I decided to boot into Windows and I've err, broken it. It looks like the MBR is corrupt. I didn't think this would be a problem until I discovered that the thing has UEFI instead of BIOS. So, do any of our resident experts know how I can get this thing to boot from a USB flash memory stick? (yup, I did save a recovery disk). I haven't figured out how to get it to boot from the stick, I've trawled around the usual web sites for a couple of hours but no joy, they all seem to suggest that I should have altered the settings before I broke it, so I thought, why not try Bluemoon?

I'm going to burn a dvd with 8.1 later on and see if it will boot from that (fortunately, I have an iso image saved on my MacBook ;) ), if not I'm going to have to go against the grain and take it back to the shop...

Fixed it, don't have Debian installed any more though. Time to read up on UEFI.

 

[roach3]

disable safe boot in uefi bios this will give you all the old boot options

 

[thehydetiger]

I'm going to burn a dvd with 8.1 later on and see if it will boot from that

Fixed it, don't have Debian installed any more though. Time to read up on UEFI.

Choose the repair windows option initially which if you're lucky will make your OS bootable again.

http://www.7tutorials.com/how-create-system-repair-disc-cddvd

 

[Dalian Blue]

Choose the repair windows option initially which if you're lucky will make your OS bootable again.

http://www.7tutorials.com/how-create-system-repair-disc-cddvd

Cheers,
I had a recovery USB stick, the problem was that the thing wouldn't boot from USB or the DVD drive, even though I had changed the uefi to classic bios to install Debian in the first place. Eventually I figured out how to repair the mbr from Debian and got Windows 8.1 back. I'll leave this as Windows only now, I've had Windows 10 evaluation running in Virtual machine on the MacBook for a while now, I prefer it to 8.1 and the free upgrade icon has appeared on the 8.1 machine so I'm hoping that the Windows situation will improve somewhat in a month or so.

 

[thehydetiger]

Running the windows repair option is great for reinstalling the MBR when the Linux grub has a wobble I had the same~similar problem when I deleted a Linux partition off a dual boot setup. Windows 10 looks a good crossover from 7-8 with a start button and menu to boot.