iastora.sys BSOD on HP ultrabook - can't even boot into windows

What a crappy day -.-


I've had this HP ultrabook for just over a year now. When I first bought it I disabled intel rapid storage technology and did a fresh install of windows. After installing a clean copy I installed the intel rapid storage again and enabled acceleration.

All has been running great until today.

I think it might've had something to do with last night. I was using the laptop last night and the battery level got pretty low (like 10%), so I closed the lid and let it go to sleep.

Woke up in the morning and opened the lid and it had turned off during the night like I suspected. This has happened before. I had left my charger at work.

So I boot it up and start using it at work again, its working fine. I'm in the middle of doing coding in eclipse when I get a BSOD. Scared me, I haven't had one in a LONG time.

At first I figured it was eclipse. I rebooted, updated eclipse to the most recent version, rebooted again, then continued coding in the updated version of eclipse.

About 5 minutes in, I get the BSOD again. Now I'm pretty pissed.

I read the BSOD message and it says something about iastora.sys and DIFF_NOT_EQUAL or some crap like that.

I google it and see that it is a common problem. One forum suggested updating rapid storage/drivers. So I did, and I rebooted....and got the same BSOD again.

So do some more googling, and another forum says to just disable RST completely. He said first step was to disable RAID in the bios. I go into my bios (InsydeH20 rev 3.7) and I can't find anything mentioning raid. I find a "Intel Rapid Start Technology" which is currently enabled, so I disable that. I save settings and continue to booting windows.

Once in windows, I go into the Rapid Storage Technology dashboard or w/e it is, and I disable acceleration. I see a little % counter that is counting up (it was rebuilding or something). Well, before it reached 100%...I got a BSOD AGAIN!

I attempt to reboot and now I'm really freaking out. After pushing the power button, I get a windows error recovery screen, but this time its different. My only options are "Launch Startup Repair (recommended)" and "Start Windows Normally". I click "Start Windows Normally" and get the "Starting Windows" loading screen. Right after that I get a very quick (don't have time to read it) BSOD, and then it reboots and I get a RST "Reconstructing cache metadata screen", and then it goes back to the same Error Recovery screen.

This time, I select "Launch Startup Repair". Only problem is, the OS / Partition Size / Location box is completely empty! I can't even do a restore/repair.

So now I'm totally lost. I'm posting this from an old desktop. Fortunately my critical files were on dropbox, but I would still like to try and get booted into windows and recover a few things that werent in dropbox.

Is there any way I can get back in? Have I f****d up big time?



TL;DR got a BSOD for iastora.sys so I disabled acceleration and got a BSOD in the middle of disabling. Now I am stuck in a BSOD boot loop and don't know what to do

Tapped F8 a bunch of times after powering up and got the option for safe mode. Attempted booting into safe mode. I saw a bunch of drivers loading pretty fast, and then it paused after "Loaded: \Windows\system32\drivers\CLASSPNP.sys" then it BSOD'ed again and went into the "Reconstructing cache metadata" and then back to the Error recovery screen

Attempted Safe Mode with Command Prompt. Unfortunately, the exact same thing that happened with Safe Mode. It froze up after CLASSPNP.sys and BSOD'ed.

As for BIOS, I disable Intel Rapid Start. A guy on another website said you could press "A" after pushing F10 to get into advanced bios settings, but it must've been removed in my bios. I do not have much control with this bios

EDIT: Sorry didn't realize you had posted a link. I tried the command prompt in the System Recovery Options. I am in X:\windows\system32. I typed start msconfig and the result is "Windows cannot find 'msconfig', Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

I can also burn a Win 7 ISO onto USB flash drive if you need me to try anything with that

In recovery console I launched diskpart and typed list disk. There is only one disk (Disk 0 Online 7635mb) which I am assuming is the recovery. So does this mean my computer doesnt even detect my hard drive?

I will give it a shot and let you know.

Also I couldn't find those settings in my BIOS. Unless there is some secret way to get into advanced settings, I don't know how to access those settings. All I can do is enable Rapid Star and change boot orders

So I attempted to do a clean install but I can not, due to there being no disks/partitions available in the installer (same problem in the windows repair utility)

I have the option to load drivers but I don't know what drivers I would need to load or where they would be located (I assume I would have to download some to an external flash drive? but not sure which ones)

From reading other sites, it appears my version of BIOS is pretty much locked down and I can not mess with raid/sata settings. There are BIOS mods/updates out there but HP only does updates through a windows program. Since I can't boot into windows at all, that means I'm pretty much screwed.

Is there any special linux distro out there that I can make a bootable USB to attempt to recover data from my drive? This laptop is on extended warranty but sending it in is a last resort for me.