OK, that helps a lot! Now I just have to figure out how to get that recovery disk (now knowing it is WinRE) to boot. Currently it doesn't.
Is the disk formatted as FAT32 or NTFS? EFI for the most part won't be able to boot if the files are on NTFS, not unless you do some multi partitioning voodoo on said flash drive.
Do you mean the laptop disk or the recovery flash drive? C: on the laptop is NTFS Three other partitions = who knows. Recovery Flash drive FAT32
I had meant the recovery flash, since that's what wasn't booting for you. Can you please open a command prompt window, navigate to the flash drive, then do dir /a Also if you can do cd boot poke around in there, do dir /a if dir doesn't show anything, I'd like to know if there is an EFI folder in there or not.
Then it really should be bootable, I'm not sure why any of these tools aren't producing bootable media for you... You can try to write the bootfiles again using the BCDBOOT tool. Give this syntax a shot (where X is your flash drive letter, and L can be switched to any other languages you specifically want): bcdboot c:\windows /L en-us /s X: /f ALL
I am suspecting it may be the 'secure boot' provision now in new laptops that is causing it, but I do not understand how that works. I think you can disable it in UEFI settings, so I may try that.
You can create a simple recovery disk with RecoveryDrive.exe or simply searching for recovery in Windows. You seem to already have something though, but not sure why you said you can't create one. Also look at your Manual for your Laptop, it will literally tell you how to boot from USB.
I never said that. I have created one. In fact, the previous comments show that I have made TWO versions of the recovery--the one that Windows 8.1 allows you to make to a USB flash drive, and a recovery DVD that a Toshiba utility on the laptop allowed me to make. What I said was that they do not boot. I =assume= that is because I have not found the right settings to change that will allow them to boot. So far, what I have tried is making DVD the first boot-from device, but the recovery DVD still did not boot.
Afaik the DVD isn't bootable at all (and not meant to be) as there is a key-combo to start the build-in Toshiba recovery environment. You should check the Toshiba site for the combo matching your laptop.
You definitely said that This is all you need to do, it will tell you what you need to know. You told nobody what laptop you have apart from it being a Toshiba (which isn't enough) so nobody can provide you with the solution you are seeking anyway.
What a friendly place we have here. Shenj, YOU are the one who said, "you told nobody what laptop you have apart from it being a Toshiba" I was merely answering you, then you slam me against the wall. Not cool dude. I am leaving here for a while to cool down.
While that manual should point you in the right direction, the basic premise of Secure Boot is that only boot loaders trusted by the firmware are allowed to boot. So by default Windows 8 / 8.1 are allowed by the firmware to boot but other things like Windows 7 or many linux distros are not able to boot on the machine without some finagling or disabling of secure boot.
As an aside, this manual is nearly useless as it is written to cover a WIDE range of their products--thus it contains no information specific to a given model--like lights, ports, controls, etc. Most of it addresses how to do things in Windows, which is common to all of them.