Recovering a Windows 8 PC without a recovery disc?

Silver_Wolf

Why is it always the same mechanics?
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Scotland
Dundee, Scotland
Looking to get some advice on an issue I am trying to solve for a friend of mines PC because I am not sure the best way to resolve the problem so I thought I would ask here in case someone is able to offer advice/help!

Before COVID-19 and lock down restrictions came into effect my friend asked me to come have a look at his PC as he wasn't able to check/send emails so I thought it would be a straightforward issue to resolve.

When I visited to check his PC I discovered the issue was that it was not booting Windows 8 at all so my initial thoughts were it must be a connection cable problem or issue within the internal connectors for the PC so I looked inside the base unit and checked all connections and all seems ok there but it still failed to boot and I tried using F8 to boot in safe mode but as that's an issue with Windows 8 sometimes it didn't resolve the issue.

So I guess the solution is to create a recovery drive and boot the machine from that and this is the main reason I need some assistance as I had never created one for his PC before this issue.

My own personal PC and Surface Pro both run Windows 10 so I am concluding that if I make a recovery drive it won't work with Windows 8 since it will be trying to recover a Windows 10 operating system?

If anyone can advise the best way I can make a recovery disc for a Windows 8 system please reply, the other solution I am thinking but don't know if this is possible if I can do a Windows 10 install on the machine which I would have to probably purchase and then use that disc when starting up the machine to begin the install process so that I can then get the machine back up and running!

Thank you for any help in advance!
 
You would want to make a USB boot drive to reinstall windows, lots of resources for that can be found googling "windows USB boot drive. "
However, what is the state of the machine when booting? Does it pass POST? Is it able to get into bios? Is the hard drive functioning?
 
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You could also try mounting his drive as an external or internal drive in your own PC, if you need to back up data. If you can do a backup (or even better a full image of the disk) then it gives you more options along the way... including scrubbing the drive and performing a clean install.
 
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