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

PeterOz said:

It takes about 15min on a 40-50MB connection.
@Bruce @xrobwx71 @Pyro any ideas.

Quick quiz.
Did you have both drives installed when you loaded the original windows?

Click to expand...

The Windows10.iso file resides on the drive of the laptop, where it was downloaded last weekend. There is nothing required from the Internet to burn this image. I'm flabbergasted that this Win To Go process is still only at 85% now, a day and a half later. The HP laptop does go to sleep after a period with no user input, but I have been working on it for at least 5 (maybe even 8) hours in all that time.

The data drive was installed by the original OEM maker of this machine, back in late 2011, and is still working fine. The boot SSD drive originally had Win8 installed by them (which means I was never given any installation media), but was upgraded within a few weeks to Win10, online. That drive has also been changed twice, swapped out for greater capacity devices, always via cloning. I installed the current Samsung SSD boot drive in mid' 2022. I check the health of all the drives with CrystalDiskInfo, at least twice a year. For those who may have missed it, one of the checks which I ran on the boot drive when I first got use of the Command Prompt was chkdsk /f/x/r, and after a couple of hours of scanning, it reported finding absolutely nothing to fix.

The Win To Go outcome was an unbootable USB stick, which turned out to be corrupted, and required repair.

Everything suggested by Bruce and PeterOz on this 3rd Forum page today was attempted repeatedly last Saturday, before contacting this Forum out of desperation. The instructions were found on numerous troubleshooting web sites. The bootable USB key which has enabled me to use the Command Prompt was made using the Windows Media Creation Tool, found on the Microsoft Windows 10/11 Support web site. It's also how I downloaded that Windows10.iso file, for that useless Win To Go process.

I am now going to download Macrium Reflect, per Bastet's suggestion.

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,
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,
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).

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 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.