Forum Discussion
ViProCon
Mar 17, 2020Brass Contributor
Boot fail: how to troubleshoot?
Hi all. I just wanted to double-check my troubleshooting thinking here, maybe I'm missing something in the modern era of Win 10. So a laptop with a 2.5" HDD first boots up and gives the light-b...
- Mar 18, 2020Hi, was your Windows 10 updated? the latest build is 1909 at the moment.
keeping an OS updated (Android, Windows, IOS etc) is itself a preventing measure to keep the OS running well.
I see you've done your fair share of troubleshooting and you can already salvage your data, also it seems refreshing/resetting Windows 10 from recovery environment fails for you too?
so may I suggest to do a clean install? you can always grab the latest ISO file from here, put it to USB and do the clean install:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
ViProCon
Mar 19, 2020Brass Contributor
I ended up having to do a clean install. Had this been a hardware fault I expect I'd have had problems. What annoys me about the Win RE is that why, if this is only a software issue, could it not have fixed that? The concept of replacing corrupted file, and rebuilding corrupted partition/file system info should be fully integrated into the RE and yet it failed on all counts, and yet, it did see 4 System Restore points, and could even browse the full file system of C: with no issues. So perhaps it's some screwy thing with those hidden partitions but let's just say that my confidence in the WinRE kind of went down here, even Reset this PC failed and that makes little sense since it all went to plan by me just wiping out partitions and starting anew.
Ah well 🙂
HotCakeX
Mar 20, 2020MVP
Yes it also happened to me before when system restores failed, I no longer rely on restore points to keep me safe, not anymore, in my experience they can get corrupted easily.
although in the recent Windows 10 builds, since 2-3 years ago, refresh and reset never failed.
I can only imagine that when they are failing for you, it's probably because the internal image is corrupted.
Microsoft added a new option in Windows 10 to download the new image from the cloud, first appeared around a year ago on Windows insider but it will soon make it to the released ring
https://insider.windows.com/en-us/articles/optimize-windows-10-pc-reset-using-the-cloud/
although in the recent Windows 10 builds, since 2-3 years ago, refresh and reset never failed.
I can only imagine that when they are failing for you, it's probably because the internal image is corrupted.
Microsoft added a new option in Windows 10 to download the new image from the cloud, first appeared around a year ago on Windows insider but it will soon make it to the released ring
https://insider.windows.com/en-us/articles/optimize-windows-10-pc-reset-using-the-cloud/
- ViProConMar 20, 2020Brass Contributor
Yeah that's exactly what I thought was going to happen, I got the insider news on that but in my head I thought the feature was already part of the bootable media so I was puzzled why even that didn't work. But I bet you're right, the image was corrupted or inaccessible somehow. Given that it would fail the Rest This PC process basically immediately, I suspect it was inaccessible to begin with, lending more credit to this being some kind of corrupted "something" in the file or partition/boot system, or maybe some general corruption just beyond those points.
Needless to say I'm putting this system on a full system image backup plan.
Thanks for all the good input!
- HotCakeXMar 20, 2020MVPAnytime, hope you never experience such thing again!