Windows won't boot

Vaindil · 11 Dec 2014

Hello! My W-10 computer recently decided to reinstall a bunch of updates that it already had (this actually happened on all three of my PCs running W-10, so I assume it was something from Microsoft? I dunno). Normally not an issue, but on this particular PC Windows now won't boot.

In case it matters, the following were all performed from the built-in recovery environment that pops up after Automatic Repair fails, not a bootable flash drive or anything else.

I first tried removing pending Windows updates, which said it completed but did not fix the issue as it had in the past. Then I edited the BCD to force booting into safe mode, but Windows still wouldn't boot (so I removed that flag and rebooted back into the repair environment).

I then tried running sfc /scannow /offbootdir:C:\ /offwindir:C:\windows\ several times, but each time it said it found errors but couldn't repair them. Last night while I was researching I found an MS MVP wiki article that says (at the bottom) that sfc /scannow doesn't work properly in W-10. Great.

So I then used an Ubuntu bootable flash drive to copy the Windows directory from a working copy of build 9879 from my laptop to an external HDD, then I ran DISM /Image:C:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:D:\Windows (where D:\ was my external HDD). That operation failed, reporting that some hashes were invalid (specifically "CSI Payload Corrupt"; log file is attached). My plan was to come to work today and pull what I know to be valid copies of the two files from my W-10 work computer, but none of the general hash methods (MD5, CRC32, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA384) report matching values even for what I already had, so I have no way of determining what will be accepted as valid once I get back home to my desktop computer.

I'm pretty much to the point where I'll just backup files, wipe the drive, and start fresh, but I figured I'd ask here before I do that as I'd REALLY like to avoid having to do so if possible. Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

usasma · 12 Dec 2014

The Windows Update folks are great at fixing SFC and DISM problems.
Their experts hang out here: https://www.tenforums.com/windows-updates-activation/

The wiki article that you cited says that there's a WSReset.exe command that can be run (from an elevated Command Prompt) to reset SFC. Have you tried that?

Good luck!