Advice Please - Win10 PC Corrupted So that I Can't Get Past Login

[xrobwx71]

I’m still of the mind set that you could be looking at a faulty drive.

Sounds like it.

[PeterOz]

I am thinking part of the boot issues are the second drive MIGHT BE containing the boot sector

[EugenioB]

Bastet,

I installed Macrium Reflect on the laptop, and created a Rescue Media on USB. Booted on this USB on the desktop machine and tried to use the “Fix Boot Problems” function. Attached screen photos show that it carried out successfully everything other than updating the partition boot sector. However, upon restarting, there was absolutely no change to the behaviour at the Windows login screen.

One very illuminating thing which the Macrium utility has shown to me, is the reason that I am unable to invoke the Windows Recovery Environment on the “sick” machine. It’s not there. On my Win10 laptop, Macrium shows multiple partitions on the one and only drive, and one of them is labeled WinRE. On the broken machine’s boot drive, there is only a single Windows partition - nothing else. This is most definitely my own fault. It’s a naive mistake which I would have made about 12 years ago, when I made the first clone of the boot drive, onto a larger capacity device. I only cloned a single partition. Fortunately I did not repeat that same mistake when I replaced the OEM drive with the current SSD on the laptop (probably following a recommendation from the Samsung cloning utility).

So now I have no WinRE environment available, or any image of the boot drive to restore. I pretty sure that I’m up the proverbial creek, without a paddle.

Unless you or anyone else has any other suggestions, I plan to re-partition the boot drive, install the WinRE partition, and a fresh Win10 into the main partition. I won’t have the necessary time to start on this before Monday.

And if anyone is wondering why I haven’t upgraded the desktop machine to Win11, it’s only because I haven’t been able to find a combination of BIOS settings on the 6-months-old Gigabyte motherboard which will satisfy Microsoft’s requirements for compatibility.

To everyone who made an effort to help and support me with this problem, thank you very much.

[PeterOz]

and a fresh Win10

Might not be necessary.
With have until Monday
I will get back to you.
What happens if you disconnect the second drive and run The Macrium again

[EugenioB]

PeterOz,
Are you referring to the 2TB data drive E: ? There’s even a third internal 1TB drive, with 2 partitions on it, past the bottom of the screen photo.
If so, bear in mind that at the moment only the 1TB SSD C: drive is bootable, as far as I know. I have never made anything else bootable myself, and I don’t expect the OEM to have done so on the data drive E:.
One potentially useful thing which I do have on hand is the Corsair 256GB SSD which the current Samsung 1TB SSD was cloned from, back in 2022. It’s essentially a 2+ year-old, bootable disk image.
I’m not sure what you have in mind, though.

[PeterOz]

If you load windows with more than one drive connected windows automatically splits itself across both drives.
and when the 2nd drive dies all hell breaks loose.
If you only have the C: drive connected and power on what happens? Do you get to the login screen still?

[Bastet]

There should be at least 4-5 partitions so no wonder it’ll not
Can you image the C drive using Macrium? That way you’ll not lose your personal files.
Once imaging is complete you’ll need to reinstall Windows. I don’t know whether this will work but you can then restore the image of C partition only & you should have a working pc. You might need to run Macrium fix boot problems immediately after the restore.

[EugenioB]

PeterOz,
I have disconnected the SATA cable from the 2TB drive.
The bootup did come up different, as you can see in the first photo, but I subsequently found out that it’s the result of using the Repair function of Macrium Reflect. When I used that function again later, it offered up at bootup 4 Window 10 boxes, instead of the 3 shown in the photo,
After selecting to boot on Drive 1 each time, the behaviour of loading the background image and reacting with an endless loop to any user input made on the login screen remains unchanged, since a week ago.
The third photo shows the result of exiting that endless loop by pressing the reset button on the PC casing - or rather, the result of the following bootup from the internal drive. Selecting the restart for firmware settings and then booting on the Macrium Reflect Rescue USB, I once again used the Fix Startup Problems function, and then the shown error screen did not appear in the next bootup (but 4x “Windows 10” boxes did).

[PeterOz]

Last pic
F8 for startup settings
Then F5 for safe mode

[PeterOz]

Post # 52 by @Bastet is a pretty good idea.

[EugenioB]

Bastet’s advice in Post#52 is in progress.
I am imaging the content of drive C into a folder on a partition of another internal drive. Transfer rate is 1.2-1.4GB/s, and it’s predicted to take another hour or so to complete. I don’t know whether that includes the post-imaging verification that I’ve specified, but I’m going to guess not, so the ETA should be in about 1.5-2.0 hours.

Will then try to re-partition drive C, including a WinRE partition (not sure how to do that WinRE, at this point), then install Win10 into the main partition.

I have a question, please, especially in view of Bastet’s comment about how many partitions there should be. I don’t have a great deal of experience with partitioning a boot drive from scratch, for a contemporary Windows system.

The attached image shows 4 partitions on the single drive of my HP Win10 laptop. There seem to be 2 more than the WinRE and main Win10. I’m guessing that the 260MB one called NONAME is some kind of collection of HP recovery utilities. There’s also a small 128MB unformatted partition, whose purpose I can’t even guess.

Is it going to be adequate to repartition the desktop machine’s boot drive into just 2 partitions, WinRE of about the same size as shown for the laptop (650MB), and the remaining space allocated to Win10? Or should I make allowance for something else?

Thanks in advance for your helpful advice.

[PeterOz]

So you did not try safe mode? Post #54.

Will then try to re-partition drive C, including a WinRE partition (not sure how to do that WinRE, at this point), then install Win10 into the main partition.

NO
You let windows sort the partitions it will automatically set the required partitions.
***** NB you MUST only have ONE drive connected when you install windows ****

[EugenioB]

PeterOz and Bastet,

In response to PeterOz’ last message, I was going to attempt to cause intentionally the hardware reset fault which brings up the error message shown in the rightmost photo of my Post#53, but before I had a chance to press the hardware reset button, I instead experienced… a proper login!!
I’m writing this message on the desktop machine which was “sick”.
I’ve now reconnected the SATA cable to the 2TB data drive, restarted again, with no error messages at all. All appears to be “normal” again.

This development seems to have been caused by the imaging of drive C with Macrium. A thousand thank yous are owed to Bastet.

Having now uninstalled some apps which I suspect to have played a part in the original corruption fault (Handbrake and BOINC), I will now install Macrium on this machine, re-image drive C, and then then I plan to proceed with a re-installation of Win10 on drive C, to ensure the presence of the WinRE environment partition. I suppose that I should be able to do this re-installation from the USB key made via the Windows Media Creation Tool, followed by a reimaging of drive C from the latest backup, with Macrium.

Thank you again for all your help.
I made a monetary contribution to the Forum a couple of days ago.

[PeterOz]

Glad it is working
Good work @Bastet

[Bruce]

Will close this as solved.
Top marks to all involved. (y)