Linx recovery partition corrupted

[watercooled]

While playing with recovery options on a Linx 7 tablet I noticed the recovery system wasn't working properly. When I rebooted into recovery then Troubleshoot> Advanced Options> System Image Recovery, I got an error, couldn't progress and had to hold the power button to reboot the device.

After a bit of trial-and-error I managed to fix it. I'm not sure if it's the most ideal way of doing it (some members more familiar with Win8 might know a more elegant way), but it now works fine.

I'm not sure if it's a common problem so if you have one and don't mind trying it, could you check if you can get into System Image Recovery OK? Don't actually run it OFC, just see if the dialogue shows up.

If it's a problem I'll post how I fixed it (or might anyway in case any non-members stumble across this post).

Cheers

[Jonj1611]

I used it the other day on the Linx 10 and didn't have any problems. Well apart from the keyboard appearing automatically when tapping in a text box didn't appear when it did previously, but other than that it was ok.

[watercooled]

It probably just got corrupted somehow then. I don't think I tested it out of the box, and I had been playing around with the EFI, secure boot, Bitlocker etc but can't see why that should corrupt the boot image.

Anyway, I discovered that while the built-in one was broken, I could get it to work by creating a bootable USB recovery drive with another Win 8 system (actually a trial in a VM). However, one of those created with the system in question didn't work, so I figured the recovery media utility was copying the image from the system's own recovery partition.

After a bit of trial-and-error with swapping files between the two, I narrowed it down to the large (~200MB) boot.wim image (you'll need to have 'hide protected OS files' disabled in order to see it). The two are different sizes but I'm not sure if that has something to do with it being corrupted or just different versions. They seem functionally similar but I kept a backup of the original just in case. It's located in the sources directory of the USB recovery drive.

I mounted the recovery partition with Diskpart (Disk Management refuses to mount it) and just replaced the presumed-faulty image with the known-working one. The image has a different filename in the partition, I can't remember what but there aren't many directories to look through, it still has the .wim extension and is roughly the same size. I just renamed the 'new' boot.wim to whatever the original was called, and replaced it. If you attempt it, OFC just be careful when messing with system files and I'd strongly recommend backing up and/or taking a full drive image before messing with anything, just in case.

[Jonj1611]

I had seen that file actually before, I was messing around with something on the tablet the other day and noticed it. Must have been in appdata I was looking as I had show hidden system files on etc.

I hope not to use the recovery too often but time will tell, I generally haven't messed around with the partitions but do know the bootloader is very touchy!

[watercooled]

Yeah, in the hope of booting Linux from a flash drive I disabled secure boot while Bitlocker was active on the drive which triggered Bitlocker recovery mode.

I didn't try for very long but didn't manage to get Linux to boot. IIRC Ubuntu only supports 64-bit EFI but a 32 bit EFI is used on this type of tablet. Fedlet is a distro which purportedly supports this but I didn't get around to trying it. In either case I think secure boot would need to be disabled though - while Canonical apparently got an EFI key so Ubuntu could work without hassle on a lot of shipping Win 8 systems with secure boot on by default, it doesn't help here as it's outright incompatible with the 32 bit EFI.

It's something I'll likely try again soon though.

[watercooled]

TBH the motivation for checking system recovery worked properly was partly down to the inaccessibility of the platform - if I broke something while messing about with it, I wanted to know I had a way of restoring the OS. Of course in a PC/laptop you can pretty much boot anything, swap drives, etc, but that isn't so easy here.

I didn't like the idea of just accepting there was a maybe-useful recovery partition on the eMMC, only to break something and end up with a bricked device for the sake of not backing something up. Don't get me wrong the refresh functionality built into 8 is handy, but like recovery partitions in general it's not a replacement for a proper offline recovery medium.