Dataplex Help / FAQs

Disaster Recovery When System Won't Boot


If your system experiences problems booting while Dataplex is installed, and you do not have a reliable backup the following procedure can sometimes get your system back in working order.


Step 1: Power Cycle

  1. Force a system shutdown and reboot your system.

  2. When your system boots again, the Dataplex BIOS dialogue should be displayed. Choose D to disable. This will disable Dataplex and sync any dirty data back to your HDD.

  3. If you are able to boot into Windows, you should generate diagnostic information of your system and then uninstall Dataplex.

  4. If you are not able to boot into Windows, continue to Step 2: Diagnostics & Partition Recovery.


Step 2: Diagnostics & Partition Recovery

  1. If you did not see the Dataplex BIOS dialogue and have not been able to disable Dataplex, you will need to use the Dr Utility to diagnose further.

  2. If you did not see the Dataplex BIOS, but you have already disabled Dataplex, continue to Step 3: Windows Repair Options.

  3. If you are having issues with Windows, but you can get into Windows, use System Resource to go back to an earlier restore point.

  4. If your system is unable to find the boot device, you will need to recover your partition table. You can use EaseUS Partition Recovery from a WinPE disk, or you can take your target drive to another machine and run EaseUS from that machine to manipulate the target drive.

    1. Under Partition Recovery, do a scan. (This could take a few hours, depending on the size of your drive.)

    2. This should come up with many partitions. The ones that we are most interested in will be the small partition at the front of the disk (either 100MB or 1GB) and the next partition that starts at the cylinder after the first one. Hopefully, it will find a huge partition for that second one.

    3. Recover those two partitions (assuming you have only System and C: partitions)

    4. Once these partitions are recovered, reboot. If it is successful, you’re done. If it fails, continue to Step 3: Windows Repair Options.


Step 3: Windows Repair Options

  1. Put your Windows DVD in the drive and boot from the DVD.

  2. Load any necessary drivers.

  3. Choose repair options (the top choice) and go into a command prompt. Execute the following commands.

    bootrec /fixboot
    bootrec /fixmbr

  4. Reboot. If your system reboots successfully, proceed to Step 4: Scandisk. Otherwise, boot from your Windows DVD again.

  5. Go into Repair Options. This time it should warn you that there is an issue and offer to fix it.

  6. Let it attempt to fix the problem, then reboot. You may need to repeat the last three steps multiple times to address all of the potential issues.


Step 4: Scandisk

  1. When you are able to boot successfully, you should run Scandisk to make sure there are no additional issues.

  2. Click on the Computer option on your Start menu.

  3. Right click on the hard drive that you want to check, then click Properties.

  4. Under the Tools tab, click the Check Now button under the Error-checking section. If you are prompted for an admin password or confirmation, provide the info asked for and proceed.

  5. To automatically repair problems with files and folders that the scan detects, make sure to check the Automatically fix file system errors checkbox. Otherwise, the disk check will report problems, but not fix them.

  6. To perform a thorough disk check, check the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors checkbox. This scan attempts to fins and repair physical errors on the hard disk itself, and it can take much longer to complete.

  7. After checking one or both of the checkboxes, click Start to begin the scan. It may take a while to finish, so please be patient.