Green Screen of Death during registry deletion and disk security edit

I am using Windows 10 insider preview. It was completely healthy until yesterday night and I desperately need help. This is the first time I couldn't fix something and post it online, so please help.

Problem 1: I tried to open a custom guest- account with limited hardrive access. From my personal account (not admin either), I tried to set disk permission. Along with my username and admin and guest-, I noticed a random user like 5890..., a long number. And removed its permissions. While this was ongoing, I saw folders with the the same user (long number) at under HKEY_USERS tab. It didn't permit me for some of them and I clicked OK. Suddenly I get Green Screen of Death --> no code, just a barcode.

Problem 2: It obviously didn't boot and none of the troubleshooting options including System restore blabla would work. I tried to do System Image Recovery as a last chance from a recent image, it failed in the end too. But this time . I can't even access my C: on command drive --> It's letter is shifted to G and partition type became Fat32. Diskpart can't even do anything on it without formatting, and I don't wanna lose my data.


Question 1: What might be going wrong here? Many things?

Question 2: Do I have a way to remove this lock and make the disc accessible for a new Windows installation w/o erasing data?

Question 3: If I hook my C drive to another PC, will it still be inaccessible? If so, how to retrieve it w/o using a search and rescue data scraper program?

Question 4: How about my image backup? It's on another drive. Can I simply erase-format C + install Win and then load the system image of C on itself and voila? Or it's too risky to try? Because I am very sure my Windows had no issues at the time of the image (2wk ago).


Question 5 (optional): Do you guys also think Windows is extremely fragile (1 delete button = GSoD)? I mean shouldn't it have prevented me from deleting those keys? If MS doesn't fix the known issues and keeps recolving the OS around Registry editor, we're likely to see Red screen of death soon, right? The more I keep fixing it the worse the situation becomes, it's like almost a self-virus..


I can't do anything now but play with the command prompt. I can't even to fixmbr fixboot etc.

Standard windows backup system from control panel. Nothing fancy. The image was put in another disk in the network. Recovery process went normal, except it displayed failure at the end and my Windows disk (C:) started to show up as RAW.

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Is this a very rare scenario, am I the only one having his disk locked or having green screen of death?

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My IT expert friend said if it shows up as RAW, R.I.P.; hook it up somewhere else, install R-studio and recover whatever you can. Should I just give up and go that way and get an iMac pro for next time? I don't know what to do with Windows; the value of memories I lost is more than 5K, and I need to install tons of stuff + do a ton of tweaks, which will take 2 weeks of my time, and it's also worth more than 5K. Do you think iMac is underpriced? Or it has issues like this just as often so I should not switch to Mac just because of data loss risk?

Because even if I try to keep nothing on C, it'll still keep game files, program settings, profile and such. I'll still lose something on next GSoD. And the multiple recovery solutions windows implemented seem to be doing more damage than any help. Please advise, I am really pissed now.!

As long as Windows doesn't go through serious reconstruction, I have a feeling it'll find a magic way to lock your drive or disallow the image recovery somehow. The best thing is to keep very minimal stuff in C, and have a cheatsheet of your fav tweaks, and have 1 spare day to install all programs and rely on any backup at all. They only work on miniature problems when things are mostly healthy. I had a similar issue before a couple more times and backup failed to work for different reasons (excuses). I think I tried Macrium too.


I did system image backup so it's a hard backup, kinda like Norton clone. I want to hook this drive to another Win installation and perform file recovery first. Then I'll try what you mentioned, but here are my concerns:

1) Will another Windows system see my HDD as Raw? If so, will it still be able to do data recovery or I have to format it first?

2) Let's say I did format this drive and reinstall Windows, will I still be able to do system image recovery? Root and destination drives are same but just it's a new Windows. Any guesses?

3) How about if destination drive is different, meaning I install Windows to a different HDD and try to mount the system image on it?

4) Any better ideas?

Hi Ztruker, thanks for your nice advice so far, here's what happened:

I first installed Windows on a different drive, let's call it C:. I was able to see the image of the RAW drive (say D:) on let's say F:.
I mounted the image as a virtual disk as K: and recovered most of my data since the image was relatively recent.

Now the only thing left was the image mount, which failed. Windows on C: saw the image but couldn't mount it on D:. Then I formattted D: and installed Windows on it but then it wouldn't see the image. Even if I manually force it through the network path selection, it'd complain.

As a side note, the new Windows on D: gave BSoD any time I installed the sound card driver. The error was : page file error in nonpaged area. And I remember getting a disk fragment access/corruption type error periodically before. It could be the same thing. Furthermore, the image partitions looked different than my D: partitions before the crash: So I am guessing certain part of D: that interfaces with memory (virtual mem etc.) was corrupt and it caused BCD/format info to mess up. And during this fight process somewhere, D: partitions/allocations got mixed up etc. Bottomline, I didn't lose any data but lost 5-6 days, thanks to brilliant MS OS architecs and SDEs. 5 star*****!

I bet a thousand bucks if you randomly hotswap the drives and install 2 windows OS to 2 of the drives, eventually BCD will messup sooner or later. Such a poor design.

Yeah, data was more important. I like the virtual disk creation from system image. So I recommend everyone to get a system image after important data changes, and keep it on another drive, or 2 drives etc. Thanks Ztruker for helping, now I have 38729387 things to set up =)