Corrupted windows installation on tablet

[CrashBX]

Greetings everybody. I have a problem with an Windows installation on my tablet which I don't know how to fix but have a feeling it's something obvious which I missed. So here's the story:
 
The problem
I recently bought a Modecom FreeTAB 8010 x86 tablet and it was all fine and dandy for the first few days but eventually I started running out of space on the system drive. I noticed that a huge portion of my internal memory was used up by the recovery partition (almost 6gb). In order to try to make the best use of the already measly 16gb SSD that's inside the tablet, I opened partition wizard from Hiren's boot CD and marked the recovery partition for deletion. Everything was set up and ready to be deleted so I told recovery wizard to restart the system and do the procedure. Windows shut down normally and after a short UEFI boot screen, windows started booting again but this time instead of the usual 10-15 second boot time, it took it almost 2 minutes and it didn't even boot. After around two minutes it crashed with a BSOD and a message saying: "CRITICAL_SERVICE_FAILED". Note that it probably didn't collect any error info since the screen shows up only for barely 3 seconds after restarting again and going in a bootloop.

Please ignore the purple spots on the image, those are just reflections of something else.
 
How I tried to fix it
I first tried to boot into a live linux pen drive but couldn't since this tablet's motherboard doesn't support BIOS at all, no legacy mode, no nothing - it's UEFI only.
Since it was UEFI only I was searching for an UEFI compatible rescue distro and eventually just burned Ubuntu 14.04 iso to a pen drive. It didn't boot.
In a desperate attempt to even see what was the situation with the disk, I downloaded the untouched Windows 8.1 iso from Microsoft and burned that to a pen drive and suprisingly that worked fine and I managed to enter windows installation. From there I entered the system repair options. Of course none of them helped. It's not necessary to get into detail about this but the first two "system refresh" options didn't work since they required me to boot into recovery from the original working system. Startup recovery didn't do jack and I tried the usual /fixmbr and /rebuildbcd which also didn't work since this is an UEFI based system not BIOS one. NOTE: I checked the disk with diskpart and the original Windows and recovery partitions were still there, everything seemed to be fine. I eventually tried to go into safe mode but it also crashed every time I tried so that option is out. I then remembered that I backed up my recovery partition to a pen drive. "This is my way out!" I thought but it wasn't. Booting into recovery didn't help at all, you can see why in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw64TD0hgls
 
Closure
So this is why I come to you guys. Something has gone wrong but I have no idea why. Reinstalling is pretty much not an option since I wasn't provided with a serial key upon buying this tablet and I don't even know what internal devices it uses so finding the drivers would be a gigantic pain. If I missed some important information about the tablet or the installation please point it out to me and I'll add it. Also you don't need to tell me that deleting the recovery partition was an intensely stupid idea since I later found out myself that Windows used it to store compressed parts of the system on it and deleting it would pretty much render the entire installation useless. Any help on this issue is very appriciated and big thanks to everybody who takes their time to assist me on this issue.

[DaveLembke]

It might show no text because its failing to mount the SSD. Everything up to that point is coming from your Thumbdrive. When it then calls out to the SSD there is no response and so no text shown I am guessing. I have seen similar issues to this with some windows installs in the past on desktops when its an older system in which I have missing SATA controller driver etc and so the HDD is completely missing to the OS installation.

At this point if no important data is on it, I'd use a tool to delete all partitions/volumes on the SSD so its completely clean. Then try the thumb drive again to see if it then is able to mount the SSD and install further. 

If this isnt the case with the SSD not responding correctly to the Thumbdrive recovery media then it could be a corrupt recovery media in which you can contact the mfr of the computer tablet to have them send you the recovery media set for free if under warranty or a small fee if out of warranty etc.

[CrashBX]

It might show no text because its failing to mount the SSD. Everything up to that point is coming from your Thumbdrive. When it then calls out to the SSD there is no response and so no text shown I am guessing. I have seen similar issues to this with some windows installs in the past on desktops when its an older system in which I have missing SATA controller driver etc and so the HDD is completely missing to the OS installation.

Personally I don't think it fails to mount the SSD since it does start booting, that means it sees that the Windows installation is on the SSD. Am I missing something here?

At this point if no important data is on it, I'd use a tool to delete all partitions/volumes on the SSD so its completely clean. Then try the thumb drive again to see if it then is able to mount the SSD and install further. 

That's my last resort since then I would lose the genuine Windows that came with the tablet. No serial was provided with the tablet upon buying it.

If this isnt the case with the SSD not responding correctly to the Thumbdrive recovery media then it could be a corrupt recovery media in which you can contact the mfr of the computer tablet to have them send you the recovery media set for free if under warranty or a small fee if out of warranty etc.

I have already sent them an email asking for the serial key or some other way to activate a new Windows install. When they respond I'll ask a followup question about the recovery. Thanks for the tip!

[patio]

Hindsight is 20/20...however deleting the Recovery Partition was a bad idea...
I would contact the manuf. and see if they will ship you a Factory Restore DVD...

[CrashBX]

Hindsight is 20/20...however deleting the Recovery Partition was a bad idea...

I know but I hoped I could restore it from the pen drive. Obviously that's not the case here.

I would contact the manuf. and see if they will ship you a Factory Restore DVD...

Will do, thanks. I already sent them the email asking about the serial key so I'll ask them when and if they reply.

[patio]

Usually the DVD's are a small charge...+shipping.

Best of Luck.

[CrashBX]

Usually the DVD's are a small charge...+shipping.

Best of Luck.

Thank you.

While I'm waiting for the response from Modecom, does anyone have an idea what happened here or how to fix it? When I checked my tablet's SSD with diskpart, both partitions were there and I didn't see any errors. Both of them are there and occupying space, I don't think partition magic even did anything.

[patio]

I'd say you wonked the partition table itself somehow...did you interrupt the process or lose power when running it ? ?
Th e partition sizes aren't even close to matching up in size...

It'll likely require a wipe and factory restore to get it back...

[CrashBX]

I'd say you wonked the partition table itself somehow...did you interrupt the process or lose power when running it ? ?

No, it was connected to the charger while I was doing that. Did I interrupt the process? I don't think there was any process to begin with. I opened up partition magic, marked the recovery partition for deletion and extended my primary partition to the full size. When I clicked "apply", partition magic asked me to restart the tablet since the recovery partition was in use and it couldn't be deleted. I clicked "yes", allowing it to restart. Windows shut down normally but couldn't boot anymore. I don't think partition magic did anything there since the boot sequence looked normal. Shutdown -> UEFI Screen -> Windows boot screen.

Th e partition sizes aren't even close to matching up in size...

Uh, they seem to be... When I add up 8180 and 6500 it equates to 14680 which is pretty close to 14gb (14336mb) shown on the "Size" column of Disk 0.

It'll likely require a wipe and factory restore to get it back...

Ah well, I hope not but we'll see eventually...

[patio]

Add up the sizes in table #1...

[CrashBX]

Add up the sizes in table #1...

Table #1 (the top table) shows disks currently connected to my tablet.
Disk 0 is my SSD
Disk 1 is the pen drive I used to boot the Windows install from
Disk 2 is the 32gb SD Card I use for storing data
If you're taking about the free space column then yes, it is weird that all my disks have zero free space but the same thing occurs on my main computer and it works completely normally so I just rounded it up as a bug in diskpart.

[CrashBX]

Bumping with update.
I sent the mail to Modecom about the recovery, asking them if they could mail me a CD or an .iso file of the recovery and this was their response:

Hello.

We don’t share the system image. In this moment we are not able to help.
Please make a complaint to the seller.

Regards,
Technical Support Team, MODECOM S.A.

So the onboard recovery doesn't work and Modecom isn't planning on sending me one either. Please don't tell me I'm s**t out of luck, guys.

 

[Computer_Commando]

...I recently bought a Modecom FreeTAB 8010 x86 tablet and it was all fine and dandy for the first few days but eventually I started running out of space on the system drive. I noticed that a huge portion of my internal memory was used up by the recovery partition (almost 6gb). In order to try to make the best use of the already measly 16gb SSD that's inside the tablet, I opened partition wizard from Hiren's boot CD and marked the recovery partition for deletion. ...

I have an Asus T100 Windows tablet.  You made a huge error which is not repairable.  You should have left the Recovery Partition intact.  It's not an SSD, but an eMMC.  No 3rd party utilities can manage these.  Windows 8.1 w/Bing uses Bit Locker which makes things even worse.  Onboard recovery will never work now that you have buggered things up.

I'm afraid you are SOL.  Send it back for warranty repair/replacement.

[CrashBX]

I have an Asus T100 Windows tablet.  You made a huge error which is not repairable.  You should have left the Recovery Partition intact.  It's not an SSD, but an eMMC.  No 3rd party utilities can manage these.  Windows 8.1 w/Bing uses Bit Locker which makes things even worse.  Onboard recovery will never work now that you have buggered things up.

I'm afraid you are SOL.  Send it back for warranty repair/replacement.

Thanks, you pretty much closed the case. That's what I feared the most but I'll still try one thing before sending it in. Here I found a way to recover the original serial key from the tablet so I'm planning to recover it using command line in windows recovery and then just reinstall Windows with that key this weekend. Would that work?

[patio]

It has to be able to boot to Windows to use that tool...i was under the impression it doesn't.