BIOS with no boot options

I agree. I have one of those phones too, as you know. But, I bought a whole box of Bic pens for less.

Now I am starting to get annoyed with Asus. I wanted to solve my imaging problem with Refresh images, but now I get the message that "recimg is not supported in this PC". I guess you cannot expect a lot for $99.

Something to look at:

Alternative to Lenovo one key recovery: AOMEI OneKey Recovery - Help

Note: I haven't used this myself.

Quote from the instructions:

For the traditional BIOS system, please reboot and at the beginning of power up, hit the letter A on the keyboard or select a Windows boot menu to start AOMEI OneKey Windows PE environment.

For EFI/UEFI based system, the keyboard function cannot be supported, so you can only choose "Enter into AOMEI OneKey Recovery" in the Windows boot menu after you reboot.

Thank you. That sounds pretty swift. I did not yet read all of it but the fact that you need not trigger the recovery from outside may be the winner here. I hope my retarded system is going to let it work. They encrupted that system with bitlocker and I do not know what that implies in that case. But I will certainly try it.

This worked great - at least on my 32bir Windows 8.1 in a virtual partition. I chose to backup to a 32GB USB2 stick. The control file (Oklog) was created on C, but that was only 40KB which suits me well because on my little laptop I have only 20GB for my C partition.





This Oklog contains only 3 text files. The C partition was appr. 12GB of data and the image on my stick (E) was 6GB. This means I can fit appr. 7 or 8 images on this stick because C on the little PC is only 8GB of data right now. And even with maximum data I can still fit at least 3 images because the whole C partition is only 20GB.





This is the action during the imaging.





And when the system reboots, you get the option to boot into Windows or AOMEI where you can either make another image or start a recovery.





I immediately launched the recovery and when finished, I had my exact same system back. This is during the recovery phase which went very fast.





I am really impressed. This is a no-nonsense facility. The only criticism I have is the UI. Those little AOMEI windows with black writing on a dark blue background are really hard to read - especially on an 11" screen. I had menetioned that already last year when I was asked to test their Backupper program. But apparently they did nothing about it. For someone like me with only 40% vision that is a tough call.

PS. Whilst I was typing this post I made a second image in my virtual machine. It went just as smoothly as the first image. Tomorrow I will try it on the little PC.

Update - well, the sage goes on. AOMEI was not able to make an image on my little laptop. Reason is because the C partition is Bitlocker encrypted. Even the Asus 2nd level support guys did not know how that came about. They gave me an RMA shipping label to ship it to their service center. Hopefully those guys can decrypt the C partition. I'll see in 2 weeks when the thing comes back what can be done with it.

Did you ever get into the bios? They might have that Bitlocker also.

Right, if you want to change anything in the BIOS (e.g. set Secure Boot off), you get stopped by the bitlocker. I hope these Asus guys can fix that. Even the second level support guys at Asus have never seen a thing like that.

The way it is right now, it is a disposable PC - if anything happens to the system, you can only put that PC into the garbage. No way to recover from an image or anything. Even RECIMG does not work.