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I gather you haven’t found a recovburncd.exe file on the partition to launch directly?

you gather correctly. i have no idea what happened to that .EXE, but it’s no where to be found now. possibly got zapped in the Win10 upgrade?

you’re best option is probably to do a clean install from Win 8.1 installation media

turns out i had a retail copy of Win8 from another computer that i upgraded long ago, so i just ended up using that and it’s associated product key, and that worked fine. but as you noted, now i’m missing a bunch of OEM drivers that i now must hunt down. but i also went to the Lenovo web site, and they do have an easy way to order a recovery disk for your specific computer, so i’ve done that as well. it’s being mailed to me, so the plan now is to just wait until it arrives and give it a shot.

anyway, thanks for all your good advice here. takeaway lesson for me is that you should always burn an image file for any new computer you buy ASAP. that way you don’t have to rely on any built-in recovery methods that might or might not work.

This site might be of interest
http://www.recoverlostpassword.com/windows-tips/how-to-access-recovery-partition-on-lenovo.html

that article is a bit misleading. what it’s talking about is the built-in windows restore that will restore whatever version of windows that you are currently running. if your computer came with Win8, but you upgrade to Win10, the procedure they outline is going to give you a clean install of Win10, not your original Win8.

A MBR system and OEM Win8 ought to be contradictory specifications. AFAIK, Microsoft required OEMs to install Win8 in EFI/GPT mode. Win8 can indeed be installed on a MBR system, but supposedly only users were allowed to do it that way; I think the OEMs were required to only use EFI (which, in turn, required GPT partitioning).

i misspoke in my original post — i was speaking generically about the boot sector, not specifically about an MBR boot sector. what i was trying to say was that i suspected that the Win10 update messed with the boot sector and that’s why the built-in recovery option wasn’t working.

anyway, i checked what is currently there per your instructions, and the volume is now partitioned as MBR. so if it was EFI/GPT before the Win10 upgrade, then it would seem that the upgrade converted it to MBR, no? is that not a valid explanation of why the recovery procedure doesn’t work? or is something else going on? how can i go about booting that recovery partition with the current MBR? i’m a little out of my league here…..

also, maybe you can help me understand exactly how the “factory reset” option generally works? i was thinking that when i select that option from the BIOS menu, all the BIOS really did was just boot up the recovery partition and that started the recovery process. and FWIW, the AUTORUN.INF runs a program named “recovburncd.exe” which sounds like it’s going to do what i’m looking for, maybe?

Prior to upgrading my Toshiba Win 7 machines, I created the recovery disks as well as system images onto media other than what I would use for future Win 10 images.

yeah, that was certainly my bad. normally i do image backups before major O/S upgrades, but i got lazy. lesson learned!

thanks for the info about the Win8 install key. if it comes down to that, i’ll definitely pursue those suggestions.

naturally as soon as i posted that the answer came to me — all the files in that partition have the system file attribute on, so that’s why i couldn’t see them. so now that i can access them, anyone see any reason why that AUTORUN.INF file shouldn’t do the trick?

meanwhile guess i ought to do an image of the Win10 partition before i go any further.

figured it out! under “account settings” there’s an entry for “local folders”, and for that there’s yet another “empty trash on exit” checkbox. that’s the one i missed — clear that and voila, trash is not automatically emptied!

finally got around to doing the upgrade, and sure enough my dual boot was left intact, just as i had wanted it, just as everyone here said it would. thanks!

thanks for the info on EasyBCD — looks like a very useful tool, and particularly in this case if things go bonkers.

and yeah, most definitely will be imaging the drive before i venture down this road.

I would be careful, however, about the very low end providers with many sharing a server. The support is usually limited, and I have had issues on a website that is so slow that sometimes I cannot update a page in WordPress and my backup plugin times out before completing.

i hear what you’re saying, but i’ve never had performance problems at any of the “big” providers, most of whom charge roughly $5/mo for basic services. now support is a whole other issue — i’ve never gotten what i would call “good” support from any provider, regardless of how much i paid.

I have my email hosted at Google, not my website host. All you need to do is set the MX records in the DNS. It was very straightforward to do. Google has detailed instructions for how to route email to their mail servers, and any other email host should also.

but doesn’t Google charge $5/mo/user? i’ve got 20+ email addresses — that’s way out of my league! i can get an entire web site with unlimited email accts for $5/mo.

For a WordPress site, I recommend you install the Wordfence plugin. It is a security plugin that blocks and records failed logins, checks every file against the WordPress posted versions to see if anything has changed, and more. It is free, or there is a premium option. I don’t know that it will find files outside the WordPress directories, but there might be a setting. It has saved me many times since I was hacked once earlier. If Wordfence does not notice something, I would say it would have to be a cracked FTP or a problem with the host’s security.

interesting — definitely will take a look at it. thanks!

to wrap this one up, i contacted the host company and they skirted around the issue of whether the hack was at the server level (their responsibility) or at the web site level (my responsibility). if it was an FTP hack, i’m guessing they have log files that would shed some light, but they aren’t willing to share those. and if it was some other type of attack, then i suspect it would be much harder to figure out where it occurred. all i know is that i had a strong password on my FTP account, and the only scripts that could have been compromised are WordPress, and all of those were up-to-date. so i find it very hard to believe that the hack occurred at the level of my web site.

the only real inconvenience of having the site disabled for a couple of hours was the loss of email. so this got me to thinking that i should really have the email and web site at two different hosts. it’s just a matter of configuring the DNS records so that the mail goes to one IP address and everything else to the other IP address. that way if this happens again, my mail won’t be disrupted plus i’ll be in a position to easily move the entire operation to the second host and cancel my account with my current host.

sounds easy enough on paper anyway.

With the host blaming you for the situation, it should be expected that they would keep FTP logs.

thanks — i’m going to talk to them today to find out exactly why they are holding me accountable here.

What permissions are on the .config directory? Try restricting write access for a while.

i just deleted it.

question — as a shared web site, i don’t have access to any FTP logs (at least that i’m aware of). but would the host server itself have FTP logging info? is there anyway that i could tell if my FTP user info had been hacked? i’m the only FTP user, so if there were logging info available i could tell by the IP address of the FTP client whether it was me or not.