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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...
- Hi, 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
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/
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!
- Anytime, hope you never experience such thing again!