[polysmartypants]

Please forgive me if I am posting in the wrong area. My post is regarding OPENELEC a flavor of linux.
I installed OPENELEC via USB, formatted the drive, etc. The install has worked flawlessly for several months up until today:

Powered on the computer, and heard a long beep, giving attention to something failed horribly.. checked all wires and they appear fine, rebooted several times, powering off, resetting the memory on the MB, computer would not boot into OPENELEC and to my surprise I receive a Windows Recovery Screen telling me error code: Oxc0000000e

But why would Windows recovery screen appear? This is puzzling to me.

I am not sure how to proceed, as I am a complete noob to OPENELEC and assume that I can recover with a reinstall via USB?
But I might lose all my videos and tvshows in the media folders.

Does Openelec from a USB install have any recovery utilities?
Would windows recovery actually work? But that makes no sense, if its OPENELEC.
Thanks in advance.

[Prof Yaffle]

I'm guessing here, so just some thoughts as they occur...

1. Did this machine have Windows on it previously? Or was it set up to dual-boot in some way?

2. The Windows error perhaps suggests a corruption in the boot manager - certainly, control is being passed over to a Windows boot loader which then can't find what it needs to keep going, hence the error. That's perhaps due to a damaged master boot record of some kind - doesn't explain why it's failing over to the Ghost of Redmond though.

3. You may be able to boot from a Live installation (e.g. Ubuntu) and mount this drive, then copy all your media off before doing anything drastic.

4. You may be able to boot from a Live installation and repair the master boot record(s) or reinstall GRUB (if that's what OE uses, I'd need to check) - get it wrong and the system's going nowhere, though.

Personally, I'd try to get anything valuable off the system and presume that it's a terminal hard disc failure until I know otherwise - backup, reformat, reinstall and restore, but remain suspicious of the disc.I don't think OE comes with many advanced tools, so you'd have to rely on a LiveCD for those anyway (gparted, fdisk, etc.).