Samsung NP900X3E-K01US Stuck

While away on a business trip, my wife said the Windows 8 automatically updated to 10. She did like it and rolled back to 8.

The next day she was editing a film in adobe and the pc did the blue screen sad face and then rebooted and for most of the day it sat on the Samsung Screen with the spinning dots never advancing past that. She shut it off.

I'm pretty good with IT issues but this one has me stump. f4 wouldn't work unless I put the bios into CSM mode. I was then able to hit f4 for and get into recovery. Recovery would start and just stay on preparing for recovery.

With the windows 8 oem disk I was able to get into command prompt was able to get into notepad save as and open the computer folder and copy all the user files to a external so I could have the data. That worked.

Used ultimateboot to run test on the hardware including the msata drive. All past.

Soooo, logged into diskpart and selected disk 0 and formatted it as I was just going to do a clean install, really didn't care for Samsung recovery solutions. Got to the screen on the oem install disk and selected the drive I wanted to install the fresh copy and clicked next. I got a spinning wheel immediately but have patience. Went to bed and woke up and still same place. I hard shut it down, logged back into command prompt and the original drives where all there again. It's like the disk recreated itself. All the files in the user folder were all there.

I tried for a day to format that drive. I even removed it and attached to a working computer.

I'm stuck. Am I missing something here?

 

How much empty space is there in the Windows partition on the SSD?

John

 

30 gb

 

Just an update.
Checked the drive and smart short and long test past.
Used minitools partion wizard and deleted all drives and refreshed after hitting reply. They all showed back up.
Booted my Samsung Recovery disk and now just sits on preparing to restore.

 

Sounds like some voodoo was keeping the partitions and data there even after you zapped them.

The fact that you had to change OS Mode Selection to CSM in order to use F4 may be a clue. That must mean the SSD uses MBR partition style (not GPT, as is standard for Win8 and newer).

Did the laptop come with Win7 originally? Or did you previously clean install Windows in CSM mode?

If you are able to boot any form of Windows, even if just WinPE from a USB stick, I would recommend updating your BIOS and SSD firmware, just to make sure.

Then use DISKPART CLEAN to thoroughly wipe all partitions (assuming you have everything backed up, of course, and you don't care about Recovery).

If you want to re-install Win8.1 in CSM mode (Legacy BIOS mode) then use DISKPART CONVERT MBR first. If you want to re-install in UEFI mode, use DISKPART CONVERT GPT first.

Now, with the SSD thoroughly cleaned (hopefully) see if you are able to complete Windows Setup normally. Of course first make sure OS Mode Selection is set accordingly (UEFI or CSM); and keep BIOS Fast Boot disabled until everything is running correctly (makes it easier to recover if something goes wrong).

Fingers crossed for you.

 

Thanks for the reply. Recommend any good winpe for Windows 8

 

Check the Gandalf images mentioned by @brainiak4431 in this guide.

 

Yep tried that two days ago. Link on his winpe is dead. .

 

Sorry to hear that. I just tried downloading them myself, and indeed, while Gandalf's site is up, the files linked on his OneDrive are no longer here.

I wonder if Microsoft removed them because they decided that having pre-built rescue tools like this freely available was just too useful. Instead, they want everybody to do all hard work of creating it manually using the Windows ADK (see this).

If you manage to locate another pre-built WinPE image we'd love to hear about it

 

Found an awesome one, unfortunately you can't install Samsung update.

 

Great, please share the link to that WinPE if you still have it.

You can install Samsung Update on any computer (Samsung or other) and use that to download and save firmware or drivers for your model using the Find Model feature.

But you don't want to use Samsung Update to update the BIOS. Use the safe approach described by John in this thread: Run the BIOS Update utility separately, save the BIOS update file, then run it standalone -- with all other programs closed first.

 

The one I found was Boot CD/USB Sergei Strelec 2015 v.8.0 (x86/x64) English version. It was pretty handy. The link for it is here. I'm trying the update thing now.

 

Well, a little update. Updated bios and chipset. F4 key works in UEFI and able to delete files now and reboot and still are gone. Now to see if I can repair Windows.

 

Last update. End result got the bios all fixed. The hard drive although was bad. Thank you for the help

 

Got it. Thank you for the update. And thank you for sharing the link to that WinPE image, now that the Gandalf images appear to be gone.