I was going to "reset" (or recover, or refresh, or whatever other words are used) a laptop, and it crashed.

I have ASUS factory recovery media. I changed the BIOS to boot from CD, inserted the disk, and rebooted the laptop. Everything looked great for about ten minutes.

Then, it hung up at this point: Restoring C:\Preload64\Patch\WinSat.cmd It tried to do that three times, and then the screen flashed to "Error" in five inch red font.

Trying to start over resulted in this error: 0xc000000f.

I've read TONS of info on how to fix, and watched a dozen YouTube videos but am going in circles.

Based on what seemed to be the most relevant, I created a bootable USB from Aeolis Partition Assistant. I then learned that booting from USB is not option in my BIOS. So, that was a waste of time. Fortunately, it was freeware, no money out of pocket.

I have UBCD, but that's really no help. Contained within UBCD is a referral to another site where you can purchase a download to rebuild the boot sector. It's about $20.00

I'm not opposed to buying a "fix-it" disc, but have no real experience in knowing which one might be good, or a bust.

Repairing the error seems to be the go/no-go point.

Any help/ideas/thoughts?

Thanks.

Have you tired to re-install again using the ASUS media? It may have just glitched. If at first you don't succeed, try again.

Yes, sir. Three times. The last time, I sat and watched it until it glitched.

That's how I learned the tidbit regarding "Restoring C:\Preload64\Patch\WinSat.cmd. "

Is the ASUS media a CD/DVD? If so, is it spotless and unscratched? If there are goobers on the disc, clean it well (I've seen peanut butter fingerprints from when a child got a hold of a game disc that needed some serious scrubbing to get off). Don't scratch it by cleaning it...

Scratches are another problem. In general, radial scratches are OK if small and light, it's circular scratches that'll mess with the laser reading the pits in the aluminum substrate. If there are circular scratches, you can try polishing them out with toothpaste (use a light touch).

This might be helpful even though it's not your exact problem: https://neosmart.net/wiki/0xc000000f-er ... tion-data/

Since your error seems to be originating from your C: drive, that indicates a boot drive problem (I realize this seems obvious), so you likely have corruption on your hard drive. Do you know if you've got a restore point saved? You may be able to boot to the restore tools partition and restore to a previous restore point (I was able to do this in the parking lot of the Everett Buzz Inn at a SGN breakfast many moons ago).

Yeah, pristine. First time out of it's sleeve.

I'll check out your suggestion. That is a website that offers a solution for sale, also.

back in the days of windows XP and 7 we use to boot using the windows phisical media CD or USB stick and run the "repair" option. I have no idea with win10. Googled a bit and this rings a bell https://www.groovypost.com/howto/fix-wi ... r-bootrec/

What model laptop is it?

buy a new hard drive, install it in the laptop. boot from ASUS media. once everything is running, use your recovery tools from the fresh hd on the original hd attached as "external hd" via usb to recover your data.

Could be an issue with the HD. The block or blocks where that file is being written to could be bad. If you can boot into a WinPE disk, you could run a chkdsk to attempt to repair or at least mark the blocks as bad. Then you could re-run the recovery.
Alternatively, like Quantsuff said, you could swap out the hard drive and recover that way. If the drive isn't too large, you could even swap it out for an SSD and get a big boost in performance!

In BIOS is your HD set to IDE or AHCI?

Yes make/model of your laptop is important to know.
How old is it?
I agree it might be a bad hard drive.

It's an ASUS running win 7.

I popped the $20.00 from Easy Recovery Essentials, but it didn't fix it.

I'm going to pop in the UBCD and see if I can get to the command prompt, for one more go at it. Then, I'll probably capitulate and stuff in a new harddrive as mentioned above. STUPID COMPUTERS! Had to vent that out. ha ha.

What is WinPE? I've got bios set to boot from CD, so booting from a disk is actually where I am right now.

Got a clean and perfect version of OEM ASUS Win 7 recovery disk, good version of UBCD (not sure which version, it's several years old), Aeolis Partition Assistant, and an .iso burned from the Easy Recovery Essentials. Surprised I'm not making a dent in it...

I think you have a section of your hard drive that is bad. You have two options depending on what you want to do. You can recover the data using a USB SATA bridge with another computer or install a new hard drive and forget recovering the data. Eventually the rest of the drive could be corrupted and not even accessable using the bridge. Yes I had it happen to a Windows 7 machine that auto updated to windows 10. There is a virus that does this specifically to your boot sector out there.

Yeah, I had a hard drive once that got a wonky boot sector for some reason, and the laptop wouldn't boot up. I pulled the drive out, and pulled all my important stuff off of it. I surmised it was a boot virus, but I'm not trained to ferret it out.

Last night, I was going to replace the hard drive. Before taking the laptop apart, I thought just go for broke. Nothing on the hard drive that was important...so...I nuked it with dban, and then partitioned it.

I tried to re-install windows via the OEM disk, and got the big ERROR message on the screen again. Just prior to faulting with the error screen, it was at same place "Restoring C:\Preload64\Patch\WinSat.cmd. It was hanging up there before I nuked and partitioned it.

So, I'm going to put another hdd in, and see what happens.