For the past month, I’ve broken my Windows several time just because I wanted to try different Linux distros. But thankfully, I was able to recover but it was a complete nightmare to recover it. I’ve sat weeks to fix and even had to face some hardware issues. Let’s take a look how I recovered my OS and made my laptop boot again normally.

Problem #1, Installing Arch Linux

The Problem

If I remember well, I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop like for 6 hours straight just for the installation to break lmao and after several times I installed it without any Desktop Environment with a wrong password 😭 Even worse, my Lenovo laptop didn’t respond to BIOS keys. It went straight into Arch and yes, I still had my Windows files but I couldn’t boot into BIOS settings or Windows.

The Fix

Thankfully, I had another laptop which my friend gave me to optimize. I plugged out the hard drive from my laptop, connected it with a SATA to USB cable to the other laptop. Only after finding my Windows partition there, I calmed down a bit. After several times of installing systemd and GRUB bootloader, I came into a conclusion that Arch wasn’t for me. After wiping the Arch partion, I was able to boot into my Windows but had the error:

Your PC couldn't start properly.
After multiple tries, fhd operating system on your PC failed to start.
Error code: 0xc0000001

Back to the second laptop’s Windows, found out my Basic Windows Parition was marked as RAW which means the there is no file system or the parition is corrupted. This is where I was able to successfully boot into windows. I did NOT format the raw partition which will erase my years of work. Instead what I did was ran the CHKDSK utility and FINALLY fixed it by doing so.

chkdsk D: /f

But still I haven’t fixed my BIOS keys issue.

Problem #2, With Lubuntu

The Problem

Installed Lubuntu everything was fine except it didn’t install GRUB. Went into the GRUB folder /etc/default/grub, edited the grub config file by setting GRUB_DEFAULT=3which instead of going into Lubuntu it went into memtest86+ and I had no way of booting into Lubuntu. This time I had another laptop which my homie gave me, which had Debian I installed. Tried several ways to fix it and lost the motivatation to even have Linux on my laptop.

The Fix

I wiped the Lubuntu partition, after several hours I fixed the second laptop’s Windows installed Rufus (had to do new fresh installation unfortunately), created a bootable Windows stick. Then it was later fixed with bcdedit which was a common EFI parition problem.

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd

These commands fixed my boot problems.

Problem #3, BIOS Keys Fix

I am not sure what the problem was, but after ripping the laptop apart and cleaning them all, I found that a part of my Flat Flex Cable was bent which made it disconnect often by not sitting in position properly and led to power issues I had recently. It caused the laptop to turn of randomly and it was cleaned and had to carefully place them in position. Then I removed the CMOS battery, waited like 10-15 minutes, plugged all of them in and it works like charm till now.

What I Learned

I went through a lot of shit which could be avoided by a lot of ways. So what you guys need to have:

  • A bootable USB with the version of YOUR Windows PC flashed with Rufus and not Ventoy.
  • An extra laptop, just has to work.
  • A SATA cable. Its really a life saver.
  • A bootable Linux USB, optional but recommended.

Sometimes a better way to learn tech is by breaking stuff, but always have a backup of your data lol