Can’t boot windows

Hi I recently had a crash (was trying to restart my pc because it was behaving odd, but it crashed before it could restart) and now it won’t properly boot. Sometimes it gives a blue screen immediately (0xc000021a) and shuts down.
I’ve tried running quite a few repair options but I seem to be running into obstacles with all of them. Startup repair won’t work, it just goes into an infinite loop. There is a restore point but restore fails to finish properly. Sfc finds corrupt files but can’t fix them. Trying to reset my pc with the installation media won’t complete successfully and just undoes the changes. DISM can’t find the files it needs to restore the files either (using the install iso mounted to a usb, pointing it to the esd file in the x64 folder gives the error, and does the same thing if I extract the windows 10 pro install.wim from that and point it to that instead. I don’t know what my actual windows version is as I’m not sure how to check that from command prompt. I also tried the bcd(I believe that was the command? I forget I’ve been working on this for several days) but the second command you put in during that process says access denied so the rest of course didn’t work either. I’ll get my version number if that will help if someone would care to tell me how to get that.

@Trindalas, welcome to TenForums.

This sounds like possible corruption on the HD - it may be that the drive is going or has gone bad.

Others may offer some additional suggestions, but I would try creating a bootable diag USB thumb drive using tools from the disk manufacturer (Seagate, Western Digital, etc.) and see if it reports problems with the drive.

If that is the case, you will definitely want to try avoiding writes to that disk.

One step you could possibly take is to either install Windows on another drive and boot Windows from that new drive. Then, access the "old" disk as though it was a data disk and hopefully rescue whatever files you can from "My Documents", "Desktop", etc. Basically any files that you may not have backups for.

As an alternative, you could pull the disk and plug it into another computer and attach it via a USB dock and again, access it like any data disk and try to rescue anything that needs rescuing.

hsehestedt said:

@Trindalas, welcome to TenForums.

This sounds like possible corruption on the HD - it may be that the drive is going or has gone bad.

Others may offer some additional suggestions, but I would try creating a bootable diag USB thumb drive using tools from the disk manufacturer (Seagate, Western Digital, etc.) and see if it reports problems with the drive.

If that is the case, you will definitely want to try avoiding writes to that disk.

One step you could possibly take is to either install Windows on another drive and boot Windows from that new drive. Then, access the "old" disk as though it was a data disk and hopefully rescue whatever files you can from "My Documents", "Desktop", etc. Basically any files that you may not have backups for.

As an alternative, you could pull the disk and plug it into another computer and attach it via a USB dock and again, access it like any data disk and try to rescue anything that needs rescuing.

That is one scenario that is HIGHLY unlikely considering it was a brand new drive only like a month ago. Obviously it’s not impossible but it’s hard to think a drive could go bad that quick. I did get a blue screen when it was restarting during a windows update a while ago (although that seemed to complete the next time I restarted so I’m not sure. ����*♂️)

I've had more than one disk bad out of the box and more than one fail within ONE WEEK. It's not common, but it happens.

I should add that I worked for a major data storage company so I saw huge numbers of bad disks right out of the box, as well as many early failures and those were the crazy expensive "super reliable" enterprise NAS drives.

Consumer drives are rubbish compared to many of those.

Main thing is that I would suggest doing a diag on it use a util from manufacturer because if the disk does have problems, it's best to know fast so as to avoid making the issue worse.

hsehestedt said:

I've had more than one disk bad out of the box and more than one fail within ONE WEEK. It's not common, but it happens.

I should add that I worked for a major data storage company so I saw huge numbers of bad disks right out of the box, as well as many early failures and those were the crazy expensive "super reliable" enterprise NAS drives.

Consumer drives are rubbish compared to many of those.

Main thing is that I would suggest doing a diag on it use a util from manufacturer because if the disk does have problems, it's best to know fast so as to avoid making the issue worse.

That is REALLY obnoxious if the drive is bad because this would be the second drive in a row to do that to me if so and I have like 3 tb of games on there x.x
Is it so much to ask to get a reliable hard drive
I’ve actually had less problems with the drive from my original hard drive from like... 20 years ago. But it’s way too small and just begging for failures at that age, lol.

Plus side is I think I got the year warranty for the drive, but that’s a lot of work to get everything reinstalled and stuff even if I don’t lose any actual data aside from the windows install.

dalchina said:

A disk check is definitely the starting point, and if problems found and you don't have appropriate backups, an attempt to rescue data woudl follow.

Good live boot disks are:
Toolkit Item: Kyhi’s Rescue Disk – Win10.Guru
Bob.Omb's Modified Win10PEx64 - Best Rescue Disk 2018

- with lots of tools as you can see.

Start with HD Tune (Health and Error scan tabs).

If the registry is damaged and System Restore doesn't help, there's no chance of recovering the installation as MS killed off Regback - registry backups- at the end of build 1709.

If you have experienced repeated disk failure, you might start considering things like your PSU.

And as ever, disk imaging (e.g. Macrium Reflect - free/paid +large enough external storage for image files) gives you a means of recovery to 'as was'- to a new disk if necessary- and a full backup. I hope you've been using it.

Truth be told I don’t know what to do with any of that as I’ve never had this issue before. I’ve never really had anything particularly important to back up aside from maybe save games but the vast majority of my games save to the cloud on steam so I’ve never really looked into backups. I’ve had minor issues before but I was always able to fix them with a lot less effort. *shrugs* I’ll look into the checking when I get home.

Oh I will mention however that Chkdsk found no problems. Forgot to mention that.