Problem with Samsung Recovery on Win 10

Hello, this is my first time posting here, I decided to create and account and open a thread after hours of searching for a solution to my problem without success.

Here's the thing, I upgraded my samsung laptop (model np670z5e) to Windows 10 a few weeks ago, and two days ago windows installed an update that screwed up something with the AMD driver, and everytime I started the pc I got a message saying something like "your software configurations have been changed, please restart you computer to apply the changes". Naturally that annoyed me to death, so I used Windows Recovery to go back to a point when that update had not been installed yet. That's when everything went to hell.

Suddenly the system became very slow and buggy, my Steam games stopped starting, everytime I tried to open any app or program it started up an "installing" screen and a lot of minor bugs appeared. So I went on to do a factory reset with Samsung Recovery. The problem is, when I hit the F4 button on boot, Samsung Recovery loads with a blue background and a box saying "please wait..." it keeps loading for a while, then I get a black screen and Windows 10 boots normally. I tried to reverse the Windows Recovery but it didn't work, I can't roll back to Windows 8 because for some reason the "Windows.old" folder is missing the WINDOWS folder. I installed Partition Wizard and the SAMSUNG_REC2 is still there, everything looks normal, the F4 link is working and the program sees the factory image, but it seems to crash before starting.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

Hi @firebrand23, welcome to NBR.

Samsung Recovery Solution (SRS) is tied to the OS installed at the time of its delivery. When upgrading to a new OS, it is common that SRS breaks. That is very annoying, since a borked OS upgrade is exactly the kind of situation when you might want to restore the factory installation. That is particularly true since Windows Upgrade also habitually fails to roll back as promised after an upgrade.

The only solution I know is to clean install the original Windows version (8 or 8.1 in the case of SRS6) on the original Windows partition. You don't have to install drivers and all: As soon as the original Windows is re-installed and bootable, SRS will usually work again, and you can perform a factory restore.

Please keep us updated how this is working out for you.

 

Hello Dannemand, thanks for the reply.

I managed to go back to Windows 8 through the recovery options, I upgraded to Windows 8.1 but SRS is still broken. The same error occurs when I try to boot it. Also, the whole system seems to be failing, when it needs to restart to execute some kind of task (like installing upgrades or after a program install), it will freeze. Random programs and games won't launch, every app and program stutters to open and sometimes don't open at all, drivers aren't working as intended, preferences aren't saved most of the time and some other minor bugs. Do you have any idea what could be causing the system to fail like this? The biggest problem of all is that I can't restore via SRS because it's not opening, and now I can't use Windows restore because the pc will freeze on restart.

Update: Was able to restore back to Windows 8 by updating to Windows 10 and then using the system restore options. I imagine this is doing wonders for my HDD.

 

Hi @firebrand23, sorry for the late response.

Thank you for the update. Sorry to hear that it didn't work outright. If the PC originally came with Win8 (not Win8.1) you should have the best chance of making SRS work with Win8 installed, without making any Windows upgrades.

If you are unable to make SRS work again, even after installing Win8, then maybe the Win10 upgrade completely borked it. SRS is not very resilient when it comes to system and/or partition changes.

If you have determination and some technical skills, you can install SRS anew by following the guidance in this post (look for the bit about Admin Tool ISOs shared by member @dosibox). You will wipe your entire disk in the process, so make solid backups first. If you created SRS backups or want to preserve the factory image, you can copy all the files and folders on the SAMSUNG_REC2 partition to an external drive, then copy them back after the new SRS has been created (add a drive letter to the partition as described in the post I linked). But only do this if you create the new SRS with the same version as you originally had.

If you want to start over with Win10 and SRS, you can use the excellent guidance in this thread by member @Gulfmaster. That, too, will wipe your disk in the process, so make sure you have backups of all data files. Since this is a newer version of SRS than you originally had, I would NOT expect it to work if you copy back your old SAMSUNG_REC2 files.

All of this is quite a bit of work and you should ask yourself whether it is worth it.

 

Hello Dannemand, thanks for the reply.

Like I said on my previous post, I was able to roll back to Windows 8 and it's now working perfectly. Although SRS is still broken, I don't want to go through the trouble to fix it, since I can use Windows Recovery Options normally now.

Thank you for taking the time to help me, it's really appreciated. Take care.

 

I got it that you were able to make Windows working.

I added those paragraphs about how to re-create SRS in case you (or others who might read this) had strong desire to do so. But I understand perfectly why you don't want to go through the trouble.

We're done here