Windows 8 I need help. Laptop won't boot.

[ExecutedNebula]

So, I have an HP laptop, I'm not sure which kind, and it has Windows 8.1 Installed on it. When I start it up, it shows me the HP logo, and under that it says Preparing Automatic Repair. After about 30 seconds, it shows a blue screen saying Error Code: 0xc0000185 and says Recovery didn't work or something like that. The reason for that is, I pulled the battery out to shut it off last time I shut it off. And the whole reason and won't boot is because I pulled the battery to shut it off when it was working, and when I turned it back on, it said it could not start correctly and gave me a ton of options. I reset the entire computer, but halfway through the reset, an error popped up saying "Could not complete account registration. Please restart this installation of Windows 8.1" I couldn't restart the installation because I didn't have a disk. Now it doesn't have Windows 8.1 on it, and I need to know how to fix this. I do lots of things on the laptop, like using Sony Vegas to edit videos, and FL Studio to make music. Now, it is just sitting on with a blank screen. Please, if your reading this, help me. Thanks for reading this wall of text, and please help.

 

[patcooke]

Have you tried booting from the recovery partition - switch on and repeatedly press the F11 key during startup. (Note - this take your hard drive backto factorysettings wiping any programs you have installed and any data files you have saved).

 

[ExecutedNebula]

Hi. Thanks for the tip. I am going to try. I will get back to this forum after the result.

 

[Saltgrass]

The error seems to be "a required device isn't connected or cannot be accessed."

If you pulled the battery, you may have corrupted the hard drive. If you can, running Chkdsk might help. Other than that, make sure the Windows Boot Manager is showing as the primary boot device in the Bios.

But your system would seem to be in an unknown state. As Pat mentions, a RESET might be advisable, if you can. Hopefully that will work, unless something was corrupted on a partition or partitions other than the OS partition.

Was the system shipped with 8.1 installed?

 

[patcooke]

I suspect Saltgrass may be right - that pulling your battery during execution of some (unknown) process has caused hard drive corruption. It seems likely also that the corruption has affected your boot manager as it seems not to be accessing either the OS partition or the recovery partition(if in fact there is one!). If you have no bootable dvd then I think you will need to contact HP to obtain one after checking the answer to Saltgrass's question about what system the laptop was shipped with.

 

[ExecutedNebula]

I tried pressing F11 and resetting. It was simply ignored by the PC

 

[patcooke]

What do you mean by "resetting?" Did the pc boot into recovery mode and start to run it?

 

[ExecutedNebula]

I have a question: if I bought a Windows Install Disk, and put that in the laptop, would that work?

 

[patcooke]

The problem seems to be almost certainly data corruption of the disk rather than a hard fault on the disk. This means that a full reinstall should sort it. You could do this in one of two ways - first by obtaining a recovery disk from HP - this would have two advantages - it should be cheaper than buying a retail copy of Windows and, more importantly it would come completely configured with all the drivers for you pc so it would be a much more straightforward solution saving you a lot of work identifying, downloading and installing. The retail disk would almost certainly cost more and involve much more effort.

 

[ExecutedNebula]

Ok. Thank you

 

[ExecutedNebula]

I have another question: I know I should get a recovery disk, but my user account had gotten deleted when I first reset the computer, so, I am thinking about buying a Windows 8 clean install disk. Would that work?