Refreshing Your Win 8 with CMD - Advanced version

If the above instructions didn't work and you receive the error message: "some files are missing. Your Windows installation or recovery media will provide these files" shown above, you'll need to do some geeky stuff. This is a common error if you updated Windows 8 to 8.1 via the Windows Store. Microsoft didn't include the proper image file to do a PC Refresh and the ability to do a PC Refresh or PC Reset is no longer there.

Microsoft advises that you need the ISO file of Windows 8.1, but that wasn't made available right away, and a lot of people aren't able to use their original Windows 8 key to download it. The good thing is, you can create the proper image file, but it takes some time and patience.

Before you start, make sure your computer has at least 16 GB of free space available on the hard drive. Then you'll need to run the command prompt as administrator. This is essential, otherwise creating the image won't work.

Right-click on the Windows button from the desktop and select Command Prompt (Admin) from the menu. Alternately you can search for cmd in the Modern environment, then under the results right-click Command Prompt and select to run as administrator.

Then type in the following commands in succession:

mkdir C:\RefreshImage and hit Enter.

recimg -CreateImage C:\RefreshImage and hit Enter.

When you're done, the command prompt should look like the screen shot below. Windows first creates a snapshot of the recovery image and, after it's created, Windows starts writing the recovery image.

It can take several hours for Windows to write the recovery image depending on your computer's hardware. When everything is complete, the command prompt will look like the shot below.

To verify the image creation was successful, navigate to the directory you created, C:\Refreshimage and you'll see the image file stored there.

Now you can go back and run PC Refresh or PC Reset as shown in the steps above and everything should work just fine.

Summing up

If your computer came with Windows 8.1 or 8.1 update 1 pre-installed, the first method shown above should work exactly as described. There are some other ways you can get the Windows 8.1 ISO, but that requires some goofy work arounds and those steps are even more convoluted and time consuming. Plus, you would need to make an installation disc or flash drive image from the ISO anyway. So, even though making the image file via the command line seems to be a hassle, it could be worse.

Of course, with anything tech, something could go wrong, so you'll definitely want to make sure you have a solid backup strategy. A good backup plan is to store your files tocloud services like OneDrive or Google Drive and have an on-site backup to an external drive, server, or NAS. It's also a good idea to make sure everything is being backed up to an off-site location

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