A few hours ago, I was using my Herobox as normal, and went out. When I cam back, the Herobox would not wake up from sleep. So, I reset the machine to reboot. It partially booted into Windows, but failed to boot fully - the desktop appeared, but no taskbar, and the cursor was constantly busy. After a while, a dialog box appeared, saying “Windows is not responding, do you wish to end the task”. I clicked yes, and the screen went black. I waited longer but nothing happened.
So again, I reset the machine. Since then, it has not booted to windows at all - it displays the Chuwi logo, with spinning dots. After 1 approc minute, the screen goes black, and the process restarts.
I am able to enter the BIOS, but there are no options that seem to help. Quiet boot /fast boot make no differernce. The only difference is that with Quiet Boot off, the logo displayed while the dots spin is a Windows one, not the Chuwi one.
What can I do? I suspect the SSD is dead, but can I confirm this? If the SSD is dead, can I replace it, and restore Windows?
The machine is less than 2 years old, this is very disappointing. Model is 180G20080593.
I saw this happen before in other machines. You probably have some part of windows files corrupted. When turning on your Herobox, try to click ESC, F2,F7,F8 (the button responsible for triggering recovery mode), or boot from USB rive created in another machine to be a recovery disk. You may be able to fix the issues by running Repair Tool.
After that, I would say, yes, this issue you had may be a sign of some SSD issue, maybe a part of it is corrupted.
I know the SSD is not totally dead, as it shows up in the BIOS menu, and if I boot from a USB stick into GPartedLive, I can see the disk and its partitions.
I can enter the BIOS by holding ESC when turning on, (or F7, followed by selecting Setup rather than the Windows boot manager). F2 and F8 don’t do anything, and the BIOS page has no option for any sort of safe boot/repair mode.
So I think booting from some sort of USB recovery stick is all I can try. Do you know if there is something provided by Chuwi for this, or it is something I get from Microsoft?
Directly on Microsoft, you search on Google for something like “Windows XX(your windows version) Recovery tool” or Recovery drive, "Create recovery disk Windows, ) For every windows version (7,8,10,11) Microsoft provides a tool where you can create a USB drive with what is needed then you boot from it and run Repair Tool.
Ok thanks. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow as I don’t have a large enough USB stick right now. In the meantime I made a Linux Puppy USB bootstick, and booted in. From there I can see and browse all the files on the SSD - everything seems to be intact. So it seems to be corruption of some boot sectors/MBR or something.
Hopefully I can repair it. If not, at least I won’t lose any data if I re-install. If I do that, I think I’d be better buying a new replacement SSD and installing on there. If I were to do that, would the Windows registration and activation all be taken care of somehow?
From the experience I had on my Chuwi Corebook X. When installing again Win10, need to instal exact same version as you had, IF Win10, then Win10, if Win10 PRO, then Win10 PRO.
It should get the registration and activation automatically by the hardware.
I got a USB stick and makde a Windows 10 Recovery disk. I tested the USB stick, and my other machines can boot into it.
The Herobox will not boot from this USB recovery stick . However, it happily boots from a PuppyLinux USB stick that I also have. So it can boot from a USB stick, but not from the one I need to boot from. Yet other machines can boot from it just fine.
What could be going on??? Is there anyone from Chuwi reading these posts?
Another update - with the M2 SSD removed, I can finally boot from the windows recovery USB.
It seems that with the M2 SSD connected, the Chuwi always tried to boot from it, and ignores the USB stick (regardless of BIOS boot order/settings), IF the USB stick contains Windows. However it DOES boot from the USB stick if the USB stuick contains Linux, even with the SSD connected.
. However, it happily boots from a PuppyLinux USB stick that I also have. So it can boot from a USB stick, but not from the one I need to boot from. Yet other machines can boot from it just fine.