Can't boot, failed startup repair and usual

Win10 just won't boot, but fails and turns off right

Hi, as you can't boot, you have two options to check your disk.
a. On another PC, download and create a live boot disk with utilities, usually including a basic disk checking program - or you could then run a fully portable one. E.g. Kyhi's, Bob Omb's boot disk.

Booting from a live boot disk would also let you run other tests if you wished.

b. Remove the disk, put it in a caddy, connect it to another PC and then run a disk check.

Hard Disk Sentinel is excellent and instant- SSDs too. Portable version available.

Recovery? Depends on the outcome of that, and what- if any- backups you have.

a. Have you been using disk imaging regularly and routinely as is so very often recommended here?
If so, once you know you have a good disk to use, restore and image. Relatively quick and simply. Such programs let you create a boot disk to do this.

b. Do you only have backups for some data? You'll need to recover what you can that you haven't if your disk is failing.

At this point what you report suggests significant corruption, so need to know the state of your disk.

The latop appears to be from around 2020, and your disk Storage: 1TB SSD (PCIe, NVMe).
As such it would be disappointing to find it had failed.

dalchina said:

Hi, as you can't boot, you have two options to check your disk.
a. On another PC, download and create a live boot disk with utilities, usually including a basic disk checking program - or you could then run a fully portable one. E.g. Kyhi's, Bob Omb's boot disk.

Booting from a live boot disk would also let you run other tests if you wished.

b. Remove the disk, put it in a caddy, connect it to another PC and then run a disk check.

Hard Disk Sentinel is excellent and instant- SSDs too. Portable version available.

Recovery? Depends on the outcome of that, and what- if any- backups you have.

a. Have you been using disk imaging regularly and routinely as is so very often recommended here?
If so, once you know you have a good disk to use, restore and image. Relatively quick and simply. Such programs let you create a boot disk to do this.

b. Do you only have backups for some data? You'll need to recover what you can that you haven't if your disk is failing.

At this point what you report suggests significant corruption, so need to know the state of your disk.

The latop appears to be from around 2020, and your disk Storage: 1TB SSD (PCIe, NVMe).
As such it would be disappointing to find it had failed.

Thank you for chiming in. I've set up a Kyhi's rescue disk (Win10XPE - Build Your Own Rescue Media).

It booted alright and I had no BSODs for about 2 hours. A side note here is that I've been having some trouble with USB sticks not showing in BIOS, under bootable drives. They just don't, and most of times they also don't appear on the boot options F12. Tried 3 different USB sticks, FAT32 and MBR.



However, even not showing up in BIOS, USB loaded with Kyhi's appeared on F12 boot option.

I could not open the files in the Onedrive default location. Diretory struture seemed to be intact, but I just couln't open anything. Using explorer, it lagged for some time and just didn't show anyfile. Using command prompt, it returned that there is no such location. I am not sure if this is a protection measure, or just an evidence that there was disk corruption.

I tried SFC and got the Windows resource protection could not start the repair service message:



How do you suggest I check the SSD health status? I'd like to point out a recent risk of using chkdsk on Win10 + SSD:
PSA: Running Check Disk Can Break Your SSD | Tom's Hardware

Does it make sense to you?

Also, I used to check SSD health every day using Crystal Disk Info. SMART was fine, 0x0 for every meaningful attribute, and general health (based on available lifetime) was at 87%.

So, just assuming the SSD is fine, then the main concern is the startup files corruption. I don't have a drive image. I do have a cloud based backup of almost everything. Only issue is that my onedrive subscription just expired about 2 weeks ago, and there is data there that I do need. Adding insult to injury, there are some open sessions on browser (work stuff) that, if lost due to a new install, would be really troublesome.

So I'd like suggestions to try to fix the boot.

Unfortunately, it would seem to me that a reinstall of Windows is your only viable option here.

So, it sounds like you are not able to boot into Windows at all, not even under safe mode?

The only thing I can suggest is if you have access to another computer, download a Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and extract it to a 8GB or larger USB drive. Boot from that USB drive and start going through the process to install Windows. On the bottom left hand corner of one of the screens, you should see an option to repair the computer or to repair Windows. This may give you a way to fix these issues you are having.

After a bit of searching, I found this page - How To Boot or Repair Windows 10 Using The Installation Media

Try this and see if it fixes your issue. It may produce different results as it is using a copy of the resources needed for repair on the installation media rather than the seemingly very badly corrupted install of Windows.

Let us know how it goes.

Hi,

Also, from the USB boot, I can see the directory structures, but I can't reach my files. DIR won't show files even in Windows directory, or Users. Is it because of encryption?

This is strange. Did you use bitlocker encryption?

That suggests you are facing a clean install.
------------------------------------------------------------

But for that one simple thing you could have tried is to create Macrium Reflect's boot disk. (Free).

On that boot disk is a useful 'Fixboot' utility - does more than booting from a Win 10 install disk and via Repair your computer, to Startup Repair.

You need to install Macrium R on a PC then create the boot disk.

Boot your PC from that, run the Fix boot utility, report the result.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As to your attempt to run SFC /SCANNOW offline, note that your Windows partition may not appear as 'C:' as seen from a command prompt like that. You need to first identify which partition is your Windows partition, note the drive letter, and if not C: try again.

However, that only deals with consistency of the system files in C: and not with other areas of the disk needed for booting; nor does it deal with registry corruption, for example.

Here's your screenshot correctly oriented as I didn't want to turn my laptop through 90 deg.

However, again, if you can't see the files...
---------------------------------------
After this experience, and probably after a clean install, I hope you will start to use disk imaging regularly and routinely- of all Windows partitions- so you can recover even if your disk is corrupt, your PC fails or is stolen. And you have a complete accessible backup.