Soft bricked RT during complete restore.

[munsterrr]

Good morning all.
So I installed the 8.1 preview through the store when it first came out a few months ago with no problems. Last night I went to try to move over to the official 8.1 release by going to the store then opening the browser then clicking on the link to take me back to the store to retrieve the official update through the store. The store update "application" never showed up(even after a few restarts and repeating the process). I thought it was strange so I said "screw it, i have nothing important on here" and decided to do a full/clean restore.

I plugged the charger in, let it go about its business and walked away. I came back 2 hours later and the screen was black(no "restoring windows" progress"). Let it sit for another hour in case it was doing something I just wasnt seeing. Came back and decided to hit the power button. Screen turned on with the "Surface" start up logo and then I got this error message.

http://i.imgur.com/Q37Af1a.jpg (sorry, image is too large to show in post)

Now I am stuck in a boot loop where if i hit "ok" it just restarts and brings me back here.

Of course I never made a 8.1 recovery USB. I have the touch keyboard and access to a USB keyboard too.


Any ideas/direction/thoughts AT ALL are greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I was considering using my colleagues RT to create a recovery image to attempt to get this guy booting but it seems as though this is a bad idea due to his SN being copied over to my RT and causing issues. Am I correct in assuming so?

 

[Derausgewanderte]

If you recover using an 8.1 recovery image form somebody else it won't mess with the keys. Worst case is that you may have to activate and you do not have a key. If you look at this post by Osprey you will see how to get the key from a 8.0 installation. That won't help you of course unless you have access to the registry and hive .

I actually recommend you use an 8.0 image to recover your RT and then upgrade. The only thing you have to do is get the image and "burn" it to a thumb drive. There are no steps required to obtain your key. Make a bootable thumb drive with an image you can download from here and start from scratch. Your system will automatically activate going this route. I've done this several times to switch between Preview 8.1 and 8.0. Follow the instructions above from Osprey's post to obtain your key just in case you do need it sometime in the future. Then you upgrade to 8.1 (nothing necessary in terms of activating this way).

Here is a post with a link on how to recover with a USB recovery image. One important point when you put the image onto the thumb drive is that it has to be bootable. Use UltraIso or Rufus to put the image onto the thumb drive (FAT32 formatted).