Windows 10 won't start

Hi

I'm hoping that someone may be able to advise me how to proceed from where I find myself. A few days ago I felt I had little choice but to go right back and recover from a backup made when I first installed Win7 on a machine I built myself in February last year. I also checked to ensure that I could boot into Win10 and everything worked fine. Now, however, Win10 will not boot up.

It gets as far as the boot menu offering me Win7 and Win10 but when I select Win10 and press Enter, all I get is a DOS window telling me that windows cannot verify the certificate of a file and if I understand it correctly, the file is listed below the message and this indicates that it is WINLOAD.EXE. So what the blazes do I do now? I have no idea what I should or even can do other than do a clean install of Win10. I am therefore seeking a way forward on this. I'm not totally desperate mind you as I do have Win7 that I can use but it would be nice to have Win10 as well.

As you can imagine any help would be most appreciated and if any further info is required then please let me know. Unfortunately, since the window that comes is a DOS window I cannot upload a screen shot.

Tracey

Hi

Just to let you know I continued searching for a solution to the above problem and eventually came across a forum which gave the answer.

Its apparently all down to the relative ages of the BOOTMGR file in the root directory of the active disk. What I had done was to recover a backup which contained a BOOTMGR file which was some 18 months older than the WINLOAD.EXE file it would not verify and it seems this does NOT WORK. Yes you can apparently have a Winload.exe file older than BOOTMGR but NOT the other way around. Thankfully the same forum had instructions for replacing BOOTMGR using a Windows 7 Repair Disc and these are included below for future reference. However, please note that this was done on a file loaded into the root directory of C: on Windows 7 so you will need a Repair Disk for Windows 7.

If you get the message saying WINLOAD.EXE cannot be verified, make sure you have an up to date version of BOOTMGR and make a note of where you have put it. Then boot into the Windows 7 Repair Disk and when you get to the options list select Command Line and enter the following:

attrib bootmgr -r -h -s (unhides the file bootmgr)

ren bootmgr bootmgr.old (renames the file bootmgr to bootmgr.old)

copy x:\bootmgr c:\bootmgr (copies the file bootmgr to the root of C: -- it may be necessary to remove the attributes using the attrib command above -- x: will be replaced by whatever drive path you have placed the replacement file on)

attrib bootmgr +r +h +s (reapplies the attributes of the bootmgr file)

In the above explanation I have assumed you are familiar with DOS commands and how to use them. I found it useful to check several times that the command had worked by simply using the dir command to check the root directory of C:.

I hope this message is useful to people as it there seems to be a whole raft of people who have this problem from time to time and I only happened to stumble across my solution.

Tracey