Recovery from Non Booting PC

but recover, using the upgrade option.

Hi, assuming you are referring to an in-place upgrade repair, this, like any upgrade, can only be initiated when booted normally- which you can't. And if you could do that, the iso build has to match what you have installed (e.g. 1909 if 1909 etc).

You mention Macrium- do you have a disk image of ALL Windows partitions? (That's typically 4 if yours is UEFI).
Or did you only image C: ?

Even if you only imaged C: there is a way to restore your Windows to as was.

History: (so very often omitted by posters)
What led to your PC not booting? E.g.
- a power outage
- a failed update or upgrade
- something you uninstalled or some other action
- the cat walking over the keyboard...

What is your installed Windows build? Do you have any idea?

The first thing I would do in this situation is check your disk. If something basic is wrong there, all you could do is try to rescue data you've not backed up.

To do that I would create and boot from a live boot disk (plenty available e.g. Kyhi's, member of this forum; Bob Omb's - and more) and run a check using eg. HD Tune (Health and Error scan tabs) - available on both those disks.

You say SFC /SCANNOW (presumably offline:
How to Run SFC OFFLINE (System File Checker tool) - wintips.org - Windows Tips & How-tos
) did not complete- further justification for a disk check.
How did you run that and chkdsk? Did you boot your PC from a bootable Win 10 installation disk?

danadak said:

So I want to save installed programs, data, but recover, using the upgrade option.

I'd say you're running out of luck. Given all the steps/processes you've tried I suspect you're looking at a failing/failed drive. Rescue your user files and be prepared for new disk and a clean install.

Unless you've done a complete image, recovery of installed programs is nigh on impossible.

Thank you for your reply.

Do not know build but I think it was current with auto updates which I frequently ran

This actually cannot indicate the build. Some are running 1903, 1909, 2004 as current builds - MS does not offer everyone the same major build at the same point. And some are still on older builds.

You can find out by booting from a live boot disk and examining the properties of e.g. explorer.exe

4) Disk seems fine, ran chkdsk again, twice more, that completed, no errors. Also
booted a Linux CD run, not install, disk and disk access seemed fine.

Please understand that chkdsk is not the same as a check on a disk. For example, you have presumably only run chkdsk on the file system of one partition- hopefully you did correctly identify the Windows partition, as, when seen from a command prompt like that, its drive letter may not be C:

Thus all other partitions and other parts of the disk are not checked.

Hence tools like HD Tune.

Given you have not been using disk imaging routinely (tenforums members time and again recommend doing this), I would expect you will face doing a clean install, first having checked whether your disk is still good.

I hope you have a full backup of all important data.

There is one faint possibility, which will only be of use if no significant damage has been done to your Windows partition.

a. Create a disk image of C: only
b. Clean install Windows 10 (delete all existing partitions part of Windows).
c. Check that boots
d. Restore the image of C: in place of the new Windows partition
e. See if that boots- may need automatic repair to kick in, or Macrium's Fix Boot.
f. Check and repair as necessary.

Learn how to use Macrium Reflect to perform regular scheduled backups once you have reinstalled Windows. You could have recovered from your problem in about 15 minutes from a Reflect backup.