Massive error on Windows 8, running out of options, seriously need help

I came across this problem a while back (my dad repairs laptops for a living) there was simply no way around this and even the inbuilt recovery partition could do nothing with the main partition. It seems to be a bug in Windows 8 or something that fucks with the MBR (or equivalent).

I know that's not very helpful or technical but I spent three days attempting to fix it and found no solution.

The only way I got access to the files on the drive was taking it out and mounting it on my OS X machine, I could then read my data read-only (OS X has no native NTFS write support).

So you could give a Linux Live CD a try and see what happens.

 

Side note for twimfy, but just go grab tuxera ntfs off the web. Its ntfs drivers for mac and Linux (I believe, I've only used it on mac)

but yeah, try and slap that drive in an external enclosure. Its your best bet.

 

most linux distros now have NTFS red n write support out of the box,

it would be nice however if everyone agreed to play nice and open up for a universal file system

 

and would world peace and ending world hunger be nice too?

I'll cry on the day that companies agree of things like cross platform file systems.

 

Would that be one wich combines all features of all currently existing fs's (and you need all of those features, since while everyone uses only a few of them, they're different for different people)? That'd be a complexity hell that noone would ever gonna implement completely and/or correctly.

Or would it be a subset including only the most basic features? That'd basically be FAT16/32, so go ahead, I dare you to try using that for your OS.
- DOS obviously works (but who wants that?)
- You might be able to run a current Windows on it (if the installer lets you), but you lose everything ACL-related, and shadow copies, fs compression, etc. Also, heavy fragmentation.
- Linux could probably work provided you mount the fs with everything being executable (since we have no dedicated executable flag) and only work as root (since we have no owner info, and no suid/guid flags). Device nodes might be a problem though.
- Mac: Probably similar to Linux (not sure if Darwin uses device nodes), plus the Windows-like installer-prob'ly-won't-allow-it snag.

In conclusion, file systems are highly OS (sometimes even application) specific things that you won't be able to 'normalize'. You can find workable compromises for 'pure data' drives, but more than that is just wishful thinking.

 

I have to disagree: in fact, it's the other way around: Operating Systems are highly FS-specific, and that's a choice made by the developers. There are however drivers for the most used FS for most OS; in most (all?) cases this won't allow you to use the "unofficial" FS in the main OS partition, but I'm sure most OS nowadays can be adapted (as long as source is available and people are willing to do it) to work with most FS, including a future Universal FS.
Of course running an OS in a FS other than the ones it supports means loosing some features; however a Universal FS would supposedly have most features from most FS, satisfying the needs of each OS...the issue would be: the OS will still have to be adapted to work on the new FS, and highly tested, and you'll always have companies (Microsoft is the main example) that will just keep on using their own FS.

 

OK a bit late to answer this but I found a solution: I booted Linux Mint from a usb drive and did a backup of all my stuff

Then I nuked everything and reinstalled Win8, so far so good.

 

if in doubt... lol

 

Well that's not really a solution, not even a workaround. Its good that you got everything figured out tho.

PS: I was going to say Windows 8 is an error but...

 

Windows 8 is pretty good. You may have issues with the start screen (I do too, start8 ftw) - but its a really good OS other than that.