Visual Studio made a huge mess

[Jonathan]

You should be OK with a factory reset but I’d make an image of the whole drive first with Macrium Reflect Free just to be safe (create a recovery ISO too). You might find it’s set to Chinese afterwards 🙂

It’s a long shot but the MS Visual Studio 2015 installer will hang if you have any raw partitions assigned drive letters (which can happen if you’ve been accessing the Android partitions from Windows).

[Bill Christiansen]

Jonathan wrote:

You should be OK with a factory reset but I’d make an image of the whole drive first with Macrium Reflect Free just to be safe (create a recovery ISO too). You might find it’s set to Chinese afterwards It’s a long shot but the MS Visual Studio 2015 installer will hang if you have any raw partitions assigned drive letters (which can happen if you’ve been accessing the Android partitions from Windows).

A few people on the forum have tried the Windows factory reset and found it doesn’t work on this tablet so Windows can’t boot afterwards. Only real option for a factory reset is to download the Win 10 image from Chuwi and extract onto a USB stick and boot from that. I would try to backup the Windows key first. I don’t know if anyone’s had any success with third party backup / restore tools on this type of device.

[Jonathan]

Thanks for catching my error.
The only way I can see that a disk imager would fail is if Microsoft deliberately set out to stop them working and as far as I know this hasn’t happened (at least yet).
BTW Bill, good work on the guide for recovering Hi12s that were screwed up by Window’s update.

[Rian]

Thank you guys!
However I was thinking about it and I could solve this problem by removing the Android (I dont use it anyway) and space allocated to it. Is it possible and how should I do that without screwing up my windows? Thank you guys!

[Jonathan]

Rian, I’m not sure how removing Android helps you to be honest but some more thoughts.

It’s just dawned on me that when MSVS installer gets stuck you can use task manager to kill the problem process and the installer will then move to the next step.

In light of what Bill has said I would proceed with extreme caution.
Have you saved your MSDM and SLIC ACPI tables yet? If not I’d suggest doing that first (I use RW Everything myself).
Since there are doubts about the viability of imaging I’d take a full image of the whole drive (not just the used clusters) using whatever disk imager you prefer.
I would then grab driver backups with DD and save them off the tablet along with the ACPI tables and disk image.
Next I would try to shrink the main Windows partition to try and make enough space to install a new copy of Windows, failing that I’d try to make enough space by removing the Android partitions.
Next I would install a fresh copy of Windows using the ISO available from Microsoft and try to get everything working using the dumped drivers from above (not forgetting to disable automatic driver update). This can be a real challenge, I don’t know if there’s a guide yet.
When I had a working fresh installation of Windows I’d remove the messed up one and either move/expand the working installation with a 3rd party utility that can do that or else I’d install Windows at the start of the drive and get it working. After that I’d remove the old partitions (NOT recovery) at the end of the drive and expand the main installation.

Doing it this way you always have a fall back Windows installation.

DO NOT casually change BIOS settings when trying to install Windows! In particular do not mess with any USB settings. In fact I’d recommend saving your UEFI variables using UEFI Shell before even going into BIOS setup…

[Rian]

Jonathan thank you for your reply.
I forgot to mention that after several attempts I finally succeeded and made it install on my main drive. By removing Android and it’s allocated memory I want to get some more space I need for all the features for the VS I need (some 10 more GB). I thought that deleting files from the partition assigned to the Android and then reassign it to windows would be easier. I really don’t want to reinstall windows or do anything like that. So far everything i tried to trick the tablet failed miserable and the last thing I want is to brick the whole device. So I cannot just format the partition and assign it to the windows, right? Thats very unfortunate for me :/ Anyways thank you! 🙂

[Author]

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