Can't repair Win10 installation, fighting me!

I'm trying to repair a customer's Win10 installation which fails on startup with a "critical process died" blue screen. Booting in Safe Mode w/wo Command Prompt yields same error.

The first thing I did was connect the drive to a different computer externally and check for file system errors and bad sectors, using chkdsk. No problems found.

So now I'm trying to see if I can repair the windows system files and component store by using SFC and DISM from within WinRE, booting from Windows installation media on a USB stick.

If I try to run SFC from WinRE (using the proper /offbootdir & /offwindir arguments and correct drive letter assignments, of course), it fails with "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation". My command is as follows:

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=e:\ /offwindir=e:\windows

If I try to run DISM /restorehealth (using the correct syntax and drive letter assignments, of course), it fails with a 0x800f0801 error. My command is as follows:

dism /image:e:\ /cleanup-image /restorehealth /source:d:\sources\install.esd:1 /limitaccess

A couple other things worth noting: the customer can't tell me whether it's Win10 Home or Win10 Pro, so I tried an .esd index of both :1 and :6, same result for both. Also, the Windows installer USB stick I'm using is current - I created it yesterday using Media Creation Tool.

Any suggestions or help will be MUCH appreciated!

Samuria said:

It often solves it booting from an install usb and running repair from there as then files are not in use

Yes, I know. That's why I'm booting from an install USB and running my repairs from there.

Yes, it's me.

So it sounds like I should first try to get SFC to run, otherwise running DISM is of no use anyway.

Thanks for posting the link to your other video about fixing "critical process died". I'll check it out as soon as I can and maybe it will give me some other options for fixing this.

Probably easier to communicate here, so I won't be bugging you again on YouTube. Thanks again!

Thanks again for the great suggestions. I will try them as soon as time allows. Also, I see that your video suggests trying to repair the boot files. Haven't tried that yet. I'll let you know how it goes.

Update: I tried a couple more things, as per your suggestions, with no luck:

• I repaired the boot files as per your video.
• I tried running DISM /revertpendingactions as you specified, but got Error:2 - "An error occurred reverting the pending actions from the image"

So unless you can suggest anything else, I think I'm going to admit defeat and just do a file backup/clean Windows installation for my customer. Too bad: I think if I could somehow get SFC and DISM to run correctly, I could have gotten this to boot again. Oh well...

Thanks again for your excellent help. Much appreciated.