Issues repairing broken offline windows image

So I figured out something interesting and got a bit further.

First of all for what it's worth I've reinstalled Windows on the original laptop and everything from now on is using an image I took of the hard drive and a Virtualbox VM. So far the behaviour is identical.

Anyway I booted a running Windows 10 with my faulty installation as an external drive and tried running SFC on that. Windows promptly popped up a window complaining about a api-ms-win-base-util-l1-1-0.dll in a temporary directory. Thinking that this might be a copy of that dll from my installation, I searched for dll's of that name and found two of them, in \Windows\System32\downlevel and \Windows\SysWOW64\downlevel. But what stuck out was that both of them were zero bytes long, as were a bunch of other dlls in those two directories.

So I downloaded the installation ISO for the same version of Windows (2004), mounted the install.wim file and copied over all those zero length files into my installation. And lo and behold, dism now runs.

X:\Sources>dism /image:c:\ /cleanup-image /restorehealth /scratchdir:c:\scratchdir

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.19041.746

Image Version: 10.0.19041.1052

[==========================100.0%==========================]

Error: 0x800f081f

The source files could not be found.
Use the "Source" option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature. For more information on specifying a source location, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077.

The DISM log file can be found at X:\windows\Logs\DISM\dism.log

I guess I need to do some more research at this stage but in case anyone can help I've attached the dism.log file.

Execute the following command to prevent DISM from contacting WU/WSUS.

Code:

Dism /Image:c:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /LimitAccess /Source:C:\Windows\WinSxS

Please replace partition letter C: with Windows installed partition letter. When the computer boots into Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) environment, the drive letter assign to Windows partition may not be C: drive letter because Windows 7, 8 , 8.1 and 10 creates a separate system partition when it's installed from scratch. The system partition contains boot files WinRE assigns the system partition the C: drive letter and the Windows installed partition will be assigned any other drive letter, usually D: drive letter is assign to Windows installed partition. The Bcdedit | find "osdevice" command can be used to find out the drive letter of the Windows installed partition, the output of the Bcdedit command is similar to this osdevice partition=D:. The drive letter after partition= is the drive letter of the Windows partition.

FreeBooter said:

Execute the following command to prevent DISM from contacting WU/WSUS.

So C:\ should reference the Windows installation that I am trying to fix? That is what I have tried, adding both /limitaccess and /source:c:\windows\winsxs to my previous command line.

I still get the same error message. I haven't collected the log file this time but I can do it if it would help anybody out there.

I also tried /source:wim:e:\sources\install.wim:1

Same result.

Mount the install.wim file and use /source to point to the mounted Windows folder.

Code:

DISM /Mount-image /imagefile:<path_to_Image_file>   /Index:<image_index>  /MountDir:<target_mount_directory>

Unmount image when you are finished.

Code:

Dism /Unmount-image /MountDir:<target_mount_directory> /Discard

FreeBooter said:

Mount the install.wim file and use /source to point to the mounted Windows folder.

So I tried that and got the identical result.

avidscavenger said:

So I tried that and got the identical result.

Not much i can do sorry.