It seems that over the coarse of the last couple of days windows 8 has shit the bed. I can’t even get windows to open today. Unless I can figure out how to get into windows, I have lost everything. Any suggestions? (No mac!)
I guess the good news is, I can spend countless hours doing Redesigns on everything. Fuuuuuuck!
need more information to help friend
what happens when you start your computer? is it a notebook or a desktop? I keep fingers crossed that the harddrive is still ok.
Did you make back-ups ?
Did you try removing the battery, charging it, then plugging it back in? I had a battery go bad with windows 8. Not sure why but I think it’s power heavy on the computer. Definitely need to update to windows 10 asap if it gets working again
We are in the middle of a move. Everything I have backed up, is old. It’s a Toshiba laptop. This is all I get now. It never changes.
try to boot into windows installation disk, or ubuntu live if you want to backup your files
I have a partition, with Ubuntu, but my files were saved in the windows side. I only used ubunto for vesc stuff. Even if I did get to Ubuntu could I save my windows files? I’ll try getting there
Done! I’ll do that first thing today! Thanks
Plus it doubles as an external hard drive so that you can backup your files lol.
I have a 160hb hard-drive somewhere, between here there and who the hell knows…
Well unfortunately i’m not much help with the current problem, but may I suggest using a backup app that works similarly to time machine on mac? I use it to back up daily, got my entire library saved on 3 separate 6TB drives. Pretty hard to lose the data with this configuration. http://m.windowscentral.com/how-make-full-backup-windows-pc
Have you tried safe mode? Spam f8 when booting up and select safe mode
Tried…can’t get there
If your data are really important, the first thing is If it is a hardware problem, the number of times your disk can be access may well be very limited. Therefore the priority is NOT to try many solution to retrieve the data but to make a low level copy of the whole disk as soon as possible. If the disk dies when you’re trying something, you are screwed.
When this is done, you can play at trying the different solutions on your copy.
To get a low level copy, you should remove the disk from the computer, put it in an external box. Plug it into a linux PC and backup the partitions one by one (linux AND windows) into another disk using dd.
long shot, but if your in the minneapolis area i would be more than happy to take a look.
otherwise, as other people have suggested: -get an external hdd enclosure -put hdd in it -plug into another computer and copy data off
@akira this doesnt look like a major hardware failure to me so i wouldnt be too worried about plugging it in and trying to get the data off. my guess is something got corrupted. Not saying doing a block copy is not a bad idea, but i dont think it is extremely important to do that first especially since if you dont know what your doing, depending on what software you use, you can completely fuck up the hdd and write to it instead of the other drive you want to copy to.
thats disabled in windows 8. fucking microsoft 
It should still be there. You’ll have to hold shift when powering up to get to it, forgot about that 
nope, you can only get to the menu by holding shift and selecting reset from within windows, there is no way to get to it from a cold boot. Trust me, we tried everything when i was working in a computer shop.
