OS corrupted + clean installation woes

I'm the Johnny-come-lately here and I kind of wish I had seen this sooner. I had a similar issue and I managed to get it fixed without a re-installation of Win 10. The very option that was avoided was the one I chose. I had to use the repair disc to jog it into giving me the option of removing the latest update but it worked well enough to at least get me back into my o/s. Two calls to Microsoft didn't help at all. They simply told me to reinstall the operating system after asking me all the things I had already tried. Assuming you have a repair disc or recovery on a USB stick I would have suggested this option instead. I would also change those settings for updates so you don't get them while your PC is sleeping.

Ladies & gents, at this stage I'm still collecting information about the best solution, so please keep your ideas coming. I'm learning heaps. I'm not making a final decision right now, gonna leave it for a couple days at least. In the meantime I got the backup PC for some light use.

@dalchina I tried a type of caddy before (SATA-IDE to USB adaptor), and it ended up wiping the drive I connected to it. Although these caddies are not as expensive as I thought.

Live Boot Disk sounds awesome, actually! Basically a portable OS. Never heard of it before. First result is

Ultimate Boot CD - Overview

but what's your personal preference? And #3 doesn't seem to be possible because CMD only loads that virtual drive X instead of C, as the 2nd screencap of Option 1 shows

How to Check Drive Health and SMART Status in Windows 10

@SCANNERMAN oh that's ok, I'm still in the process of collecting as much info as I can, not rushing into anything. But I feel your pain lol, these things ALWAYS happen to me at the most inconvenient times. Whether it's the weekend or a few days before my pay day when I'll have enough cash to burn for tech emergencies...

It's definitely taught me a lesson now to look into image backups.

Yes the option to uninstall quality/feature update was always available, even without the installation flash drive connected, but I hadn't tried it.

What exactly did you get rid of? A quality update or a feature update? And did you just reinstall that update afterwards?

My issue was with the recent quality rollup. I fought with the thing all night. I think someone here mentioned that you should disconnect all external drives and any additional drives not related to the o/s you're trying to fix. That's good advice. Methinks part of my issue was all the other drives that were in my unit at the time of running that update. I don't rightly recall if I did reinstall it but I likely did. At any rate I'll get back to you on that as I'm on my work station atm. I own a number of PCs and run a small network in my basement with six desks and many desktops. (A sort of old style internet cafe.) That doesn't include my work bench where I resurrect old PCs and do PC repairs for my community. I also service my community with social networking as we don't have a newspaper in this tiny town way off in the wildy, Canada's GWN. It keeps me busy in my retirement years. :)

@SCANNERMAN I usually delay updates for as long as I can because they can be so irritating and troublesome.

The previous feature update literally installed itself a few days after I had delayed updates for a month, as I had gone to the Boys' weewee room to "drop the kids off at the pool" as a dirty old man used to say back in the day lol. I come back out, the farting thing had already self-downloaded and had started to install itself.

Oh...I was so frikkin pissed. I launched a 15-minute promo that would make even Jim Cornette envious. Every time I shut down Update Medic & Orchestrator via Services I always say "f***ing spyware" because that's how it acts! Runs itself and doesn't stop until it's finished doing whatever the hell it wants and I have no say in it.

- - - Updated - - -

@SCANNERMAN unfortunately it didn't work. I tried both with and without the installation flash, it couldn't uninstall anything. Not a quality update nor a feature update.

@Ghot here's a closer look at my screen & BIOS the way it was when I first tried to clean-install and ran into the GPT error. Would really appreciate it if you can take a look when you got a minute to spare.

What I'm worried about is that the flash drive was already booting as UEFI when it gave me the GPT error. So if I delete all the partitions on the primary drive, do I just proceed with the installation and the new partitions will be GPT or MBR? Or is that a setting I have to manually assign? Let me know if you need any other screencaps.

@SCANNERMAN sysrestore didn't work, kept telling me to reboot & select the OS I want to rollback. Which makes zero sense to me since there's only ONE OS on my PC.

Since the uninstall of updates is also a bust, I guess I'm gonna go ahead with a clean install sometime tomorrow. Now all I need to figure out is to how to make the new partition a GPT and install the OS on it without it giving me any grief.

As you can see from the new screencaps, the installation flash drive is already booted as UEFI so I don't know what the hell its problem is and why it keeps giving me the GPT style error.

PC troubleshooting never fails to do my head in, I got a short fuse when it comes to it. And I'm behind on my work because this backup PC is very bare-bones and I can hardly run anything on it.

GloriousPurpose said:

@SCANNERMAN sysrestore didn't work, kept telling me to reboot & select the OS I want to rollback. Which makes zero sense to me since there's only ONE OS on my PC.

Since the uninstall of updates is also a bust, I guess I'm gonna go ahead with a clean install sometime tomorrow. Now all I need to figure out is to how to make the new partition a GPT and install the OS on it without it giving me any grief.

As you can see from the new screencaps, the installation flash drive is already booted as UEFI so I don't know what the hell its problem is and why it keeps giving me the GPT style error.

Aaah.. the plot thickens! Sounds like you need to disconnect some stuff. You definitely have a number of other drives by the looks of those screen shots. Disconnect all the drives that don't have your operating system on them and give that a go. Make sure your PC is turned off when you do this. (I probably don't have to tell you that. I'm just trying to cover my own butt cheeks.) GPT is definitely the correct format for UEFI but if it was running before this mishap hopefully you can roll it back a bit. If not NOT all is lost. Holler at me before you wipe your drive. This is always a last resort. Don't go gentle into that dark knight. Be stubborn. Be spiteful. Be unorthodox.

@SCANNERMAN oh you want stubborn, oh baby, just wait for it!

When I mentioned the previous feature update installing itself, I might've interrupted the installation. This was a few months ago. But it didn't seem to cause any problems and I could use & update my PC with other quality updates just fine.

So the version that crapped out on me on Friday is most likely 21H1...so since I can't do a Refresh with 21H2...I tracked down the 21H1 ISO from here

TechBench by WZT (v4.1.1)

and I'll give that a try. Still, I like to hoard information so I'm not ruling anything out that anyone else might suggest in the meantime. I don't want to panic every time my PC does something it's not supposed to.

Oooh.. the old H1N1 dealio... Wait. That's a flu virus. Well, I suppose it beats H20. As for unorthodoxy, somehow I have gotten my main Windoze 10 o/s to smarten up by reinstalling it on another hard drive while the original was still connected. Don't ask me how this works. All I know is I've done it twice now on two different PCs. At least it could get your system up and running for recovery?

SCANNERMAN said:

reinstalling it on another hard drive while the original was still connected. Don't ask me how this works. All I know is I've done it twice now on two different PCs. At least it could get your system up and running for recovery?

The only other SSD I have is my 1tb gaming library that has about 150gb of free space, and the other 850gb is used up. I couldn't install anything on it because of the GPT style thing unless I wiped it. No can do.

Right now I'm looking into how to create a bootable flash drive for 21H1 with "Rufus" without MS's help. Good thing I have a couple spare ones. Either that or fork out 20 bucks to buy a 5-pack of dual layer blank dvds to fit the 5.5gb ISO.