Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

C: + enter did it! Thank you so much!

I'm checking the partitions right now.

New problem: got to C-drive/windows/system32 but still can't run sfc as I still get the same 'Windows Resources Protection could not perform the requested option' as before...

Same with DISM. Still only accessing the windows PE with the /online option...

Are you running as Administrator?

I think so. The command prompt runs with adminstrative privileges, and any program I open with 'run' also has them. (feeling more stupid by the second here... )

mrswing said:

I think so. The command prompt runs with adminstrative privileges, and any program I open with 'run' also has them. (feeling more stupid by the second here... )

Everything you run from PE runs as SYSTEM.

There is no concept of users or groups or administrators in PE - you (SYSTEM) automatically have full access to local resources. Don't worry about it :)

Don't feel that way. Everyone has been where you are now and learns something new every day. When the command line window is in Administrator mode it shows Administrator in the title bar. Right clicking on shortcut and run as administrator will do it.

Edit: I'm still learning and defer to the more experienced.

It has administrator in the title bar. But every command I enter stays on the PE level - by which I mean it doesn't run because of Windows Protection Resources not allowing it or being able to perform the action (I guess that is because it refers to the PE and not to the original Windows 10 install?).

mrswing said:

It has administrator in the title bar.

Type echo %username% and you'll see you are SYSTEM.

SYSTEM already has same authorities as Administrator - perhaps that is why cmd.exe shows it in title bar - but anyway it is irrelevant as users don't exist in PE. If you launch a program using "run as administrator" by right clicking in the GUI you can see in task manager it starts under SYSTEM - same as if you didn't. This is just the GUI trying to confuse you rather than anything else as bits of Windows are added to standard PE to make it easier to use. Don't read too much into details as things may not work exactly the same as when running in Windows.

mrswing said:

But every command I enter stays on the PE level - by which I mean it doesn't run because of Windows Protection Resources not allowing it or being able to perform the action (I guess that is because it refers to the PE and not to the original Windows 10 install?).

What you are trying to do here?

Remember if you are booting PE you are probably wanting to do things to the Windows image mounted at C (to which you'll have full unrestricted access if it is mounted), not the PE environment that you are running.

For example you don't want to use DISM to repair the PE image. You want to be repairing the offline Windows image so rather than specifying /online you'd specify the image you want to repair. Like this

Code:

dism /image:c:\ /cleanup-image /restorehealth /source:wim:X:\sources\install.wim:1

Perhaps you should post what you are trying to do as I was only guessing it was dism.