System Restore Killed My Laptop

Started a System Restore. Wandered off to do other things. Came back, laptop was off.

Now I get a "starting automatic repair" or something like that below the Lenovo logo in the opening splash screen, followed by "Diagnosing your PC". Then I get an "Automatic Repair" screen offering Restart or Advanced Options.

There's an option to reset the PC, but I have some files stored on the Desktop I don't want to lose. I can do a System Restore from this screen as well, but that fails, as does Startup Repair. Other than that, I'm not sure what to do with any of the other options.

I can't give my Windows version number as I cannot boot into Windows.

Keep cool! Nothing is lost - till now!

I cannot find anything on how to make CDI bootable, only different places to download it.

dalchina said:

You do, of course, have a recent full 3rd party disk image of your disks... as is endlessly recommended here.

Don't even know what that means, but other than the handful of files that happen to be on the desktop at the moment the laptop has two installed programs and runs everything else between externals and the cloud, so it's not a particularly critical disk 99% of the time.

dalchina said:

If you had followed the endless recommendations to use disk imaging - you wouldn't be worried.

I don't spend my leisure time on here, so this is the first time I've seen it mentioned but as I said in my previous post there are a mere handful of files I was temporarily storing on my desktop and absolutely nothing else of value. Imaging the disk, unless I happened to have done it within the last couple of days, would not help here.

This is all tangential to the actual issue.

- - - Updated - - -

I pulled the hard drive and threw it in an enclosure, since I could find instructions for that, backed up the five files I needed and ran it through CDI (everything was fine).

Reassembled the laptop, and...I'm getting a "Boot Menu" with four options:
1. Windows Boot Manager
2. ATAPI CD: HL-DT-S DVDRAM GUE0N
3. PCI LAN: EFI Network (IPv4)
4. PCI LAN: EFI Network (IPv6)

Selecting any of the options simply presents me with the same menu again.

Yeah, it occurred to me that the hard disk not being replaced correctly was most likely. I'm not sure what happened, but I just gave the little ribbon thing that connects it to the mobo a bit of a wiggle and we seem to be okayish. In that it now boots to something Windows-related, although that in turn simply says it ran into a problem and needs to reboot, followed by...a black screen, seemingly forever.

I would try running bcdboot at cmd prompt from winpe .


If that doesnt get you anywhere, you could borrow one of my winpe so you can see what you are doing.

do you have another windows machine or just that laptop