Originally Posted by
YVR Cockroach
Still haven't given up on recovering my computer. It would appear that the BIOS (or whatever else is in the CMOS) is looking for something specific on the ODD because that is where is actually stops to look for something (found and used an external DVD and it does the same as what it does on the built-in ODD).
Funny thing is that Win 8 and Win 8.1 only seem to ask the casual user to make a bootable recovery media using a flash drive. I found that you can make the recovery media on anything with sdclt.exe (must be run as admin).
So far, I've tried recovery DVDs from Win7 x64 and Win 8.1 x64 from two Intel systems (didn't work). I wonder if it is looking for a specifically-signed (product key?) DVD from/for the AMD CPU. The only recovery media I do have for the computer is the Win 8 on flash drive (which the computer will not read). Could someone point me the right way to transfer at least the initial loading files of the recovery media on the flash drive to a DVD (doubt I can put the contents of a 8+ GB flash drive onto a DVD)?
You could always try using a USB 1.44 drive, download a copy of MS DOS, boot from that, and then delete all partitions and do a hard format of your HDD.
Of course you will then need a bootable copy of whichever flavor of Windows you wish to use along with a corresponding legit product key.
If you can't boot to DOS from a floppy drive then you likely have a pretty serious hardware problem.