Laptop won't boot to either the CD/DVD or to a USB Flash Drive

Question

Update: Apparently Diskpart should display unused usb ports as well as the DVD/CD player. Mine doesn't. All I can see here is the laptop hard drive. I'm suspecting this is a more serious issue than a corrupted UEFI directory. Stay tuned. Note: I'm going thru the Event Viewer, and whoa is that ugly.

Continue to work on this one: I found some UEFI diagnostic tools at the HP website for this laptop. Everything tests out okay. No failures anywhere.

It looks like I erroneously cleaned off the FAT32 UEFI partition. I think I need to rebuild that storage, at least so I can boot to the DVD player again.

I was attempting to create a self standing USB Flash Drive with Ubuntu. I specifically don't want to put Ubuntu on a partition, I'd just like to run it off of a usb drive. Somehow I think I've corrupted the UEFI system where the USB or the CD/DVD drive is involved.

--HP G6-2249WM laptop

--Windows 8.1

--I did reinstall the UEFI driver from HP, that changed nothing, except to hide the bios boot options during startup.

At this point, I can no longer boot to either the USB system or to a CD/DVD (to run "boot repair disk" .. a tool that cleans up UEFI control system). The system boots fine in Windows 8.1. I can see the dvd drive fine in Windows explorer. I've changed the BIOS boot order, no go. I've changed the BIOS Disc Security check, still no go. (I put that back, after test.) At this point, I've removed the USB drive. I'd just like to get the DVD/CD boot thing working.

I can get to the Windows Advanced options and run the Command Prompt. I can run diskpart. When I do DISKPART> list partition, I only see the normal hard drive. (Disk 0 Online size 698GB Free 0b Dyn =blank and GPT *) The CD/DVD isn't visible there at all.

I'm hoping to boot to the DVD/CD so I can clean up the system so I can then boot to the USB at will. Because the CD is a complete linux implementation, I can't run it from windows explorer. I can see that the CD has a /boot/grub/x86_64-efi directory as well as /EFI/BOOT directory.

Any ideas on how to boot to the CD/DVD? And again, yes, my bios is set to boot to CD/DVD before hard drive. That just doesn't work. Ditto for all of the choices at bootup. No matter what I select Windows 8.1 loads up.

Anybody been here before? Ideas?

What I really want to do is generate a Boot Info Summary like you get from "boot-repair-disk".

tags: GPT

Answer 1

Is it an older cd/dvd drive? You may have to install drivers to access the drive first using a 3 1/2" disc first. I remember having to do that long ago. The driver I used is MSCDEX. That doesn't explain the problem with the usb booting however, although I guess it's possible you don't have the correct driver for it either. All of this seems a bit unlikely though if you're on a pc with windows 8.1. You might try a different type of boot disk (any version of windows, or another linux distro), just to verify it's not actually the boot files not having everything they need or something along those lines.

Do the lights on the dvd player even light up as it's booting? That can be an easy way to tell if it's a problem with the boot disc itself. If lights don't flicker and it doesn't act like it's even checking the contents of the drive, it might be having a problem connecting to it, or it just doesn't have all the files it needs to boot. It's normal for the light to turn on once and turn back off but there will be more lights/flickering when it's actually trying to read from it and run something.

Could also check the boot disc on another machine just to test and make sure the files are loaded on the disc correctly. If it's a linux distro it's kinda hard to mess those up but anything is possible.

Answer 2

I spent a huge amount of time on this... and the defect was way beyond an UEFI setup.

I couldn't boot to CD/DVD. I couldn't get to the special Win 8.1 advanced menu selections. I couldn't open the special authority command line editor.

I spent a lot of time with:

• diskpart
• bcdboot
• bootrec
• chkdsk
• reagentc

I never could figure out what specifically was corrupted.

After two days of trying different things, I abandoned all hope. I do know that over the past year I had a heck of a lot of programs downloaded, many of which could have adversely affected things. (Multiple versions of Java, nodejs, meteor for windows, Autocad, Solidworks with some funky update tools, bash cli tools, XAMPP and Debugger, and a lot of tools tied to MongoDB for windows...) A clean up is probably in order.

I was unable to recover Windows directly from the hard drive recovery partition. I ended up creating a set of backup DVD's (six in all ). I erased and restaged the hard drive back to original from backup DVDs, via win8.1 menu. Fortunately in that mode the DVD booted up fine. Took six or seven hours in all to get windows clean. I'm still working on all the windows updates (123 of 'em).