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When I power on the laptop I'm greeted with a blue screen that reads, among other things:

The operating system couldn't be loaded because the HAL is missing or 
contains errors

Thankfully I can boot from a USB recovery drive, and have attempted several different fixes from those suggested in this post to rebuilding the BCD file from scratch as described here. All that changed were the startup errors, which varied from an issue with \Windows\System32\winloader.exe to exhibiting a completely black screen.

I would love to use something as simple as

bcdboot C:\Windows /s B: /f ALL

to fix things, but this fails with some error in comparing checksums.

I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that if someone posted the results of

bcdedit /enum

from a working BCD file with the same laptop (HP Stream 13), I could make my own match it and be set. I do not know though. Any suggestions aside from wiping the thing with a clean install? If it's any help, I also have a bootable Linux USB that could be used in the repair process. Many thanks for your suggestions!

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glinka
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  • I very much suspect that you have serious disk errors that are causing this. I don't think that anything will recover it though I could easily be wrong. I suggest doing some low-level checks on the disk. Also booting from a Linux livecd to look at data on the disk to see if it is corrupted. – Julian Knight Jun 19 '15 at 21:20
  • Running `chkdsk` found no problems, is there some further/more thorough test I could run? – glinka Jun 19 '15 at 21:25
  • Smart test maybe? – DavidPostill Jun 19 '15 at 21:35
  • Is that available from the command line? – glinka Jun 19 '15 at 21:43
  • It seems everything's okay with the drive, I just need to tell the computer how to load it is at startup. Somehow. – glinka Jun 19 '15 at 21:45
  • There should be a hard drive test from the bios, I suggest you run the extended version and see if it finds any bad sectors. – Moab Jun 19 '15 at 22:00
  • There might be an answer at http://superuser.com/questions/566935/windows-8-efi-boot-issue for a similar issue. – DrMoishe Pippik Jun 19 '15 at 22:40
  • Thank you all for your suggestions but I've decided a clean install will be the quickest solution (@DrM switching the `/f` flag had no effect I'm afraid). – glinka Jun 19 '15 at 22:52
  • Any constructive criticism from the downvote? – glinka Jun 20 '15 at 16:08

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As it turns out, one cannot remove the recovery partition from an HP Stream laptop as it uses a new OS layout called WIMBoot. In brief, the recovery partition contains essential compressed .wim files that Windows loads as needed during normal operation. Thus deleting the recovery drive thoroughly breaks your OS.

I had wondered why, after copying the recovery partition to a USB drive I wasn't presented a Delete the recovery partition option as others were. It seems there was quite a good reason for it after all.

All this to say, the only solution is to reinstall from the recovery media. Unsurprisingly, this also recreates the recovery partition you had tried so hard to be rid of.

glinka
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