I have an HP 8200 Elite running Win 7 Pro, I tried to upgrade to Win 8 Pro. When I did it, it seemed to work, in fact I had a new desktop and was actually using it just fine. I had upgraded MacDrive based on a message to do so. It then asked me to reboot. I did and it has never come back.
It seems to be booting but after the 4-pane blue window and the spinning circle, it flashes a message that went off so fast I never could read the one line, so I finally took a picture of it. It said, "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some info, and then we'll restart for you." Well, it never does anything but go into "automatic Repair Mode." Then it does the "Attempting to Fix Things" and "Diagnostic Mode." But it always comes back with the same message, "Windows was unable to repair your computer." Would you like to shut down or try advanced mode? Advanced mode isn't any better but one messasge I got said, "In order to repair your PC, Windows must have access to the drive it resides on. Can you unlock that drive?"
That got me thinking, one of the first things it said after the install started was, "you must uninstall the following programs before proceding." Then there was a list of HP Privacy and security programs, about six of them, including: HP Protect Tool, HP Privacy Manager, HP Theft Recovery, And several more about HP Device protection. Three smaller ones had to be removed before I could install the father tree program, but there were about six in all and Windows 8 Pro obviously did not like them. Win 8 installer had me reboot after that and then continued the installation, and as I mentioned it all ran and seemed fine until I rebooted and I never saw Windows 8 or any Windows program again.
I got to the setup and ran something called the "DPS Self Test." It took about three hours but reported that the hard drive had passed both the tests.
That got me thinking that maybe one of these HP apps like the device protector maybe didn't get completely uninstalled and now it has locked access to my hard drive period.
Or maybe it locked it and then got deleted so it couldn't now unlock the hard drive. Anyway, I don't have all the CD's I used to have with Norton on them where you could check the hard drive yourself right from the CD. I'm baffled as to what to try next.
I wasn't backed up so I will lose everything including my Payroll program (It was backed up but to the same hard drive). I should know better but I didn't. Any help would be greatly appreciated.