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Old December 5th 17, 01:53 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Alek
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Posts: 619
Default Help for a friend

Thanks but this is too sophisticated for him. Also, his nearest
grandkids are TWO hours away. (Mine is FIVE but her mom and dad and aunt
and uncle are computer pros :-)

Paul wrote on 12/4/2017 7:07 PM:
Alek wrote:
Wellllllll, he rebooted one more time and guess what?

Alek wrote on 12/4/2017 5:12 PM:
A dear old friend called me in a panic -- "my computer won't boot".
Windows 10 on an 8-year-old PC.

I walked him though all the repair/restore/reset options and nothing worked.

Any thoughts as to what is wrong?

Since he needs to pay bills online no later than Thursday, I suggested
he go out and buy a new computer, and set it up for the most important
tasks. And then we can consider getting his files off the old HD onto
the new.

What do you think?

Please, no snarky remarks. We're both 83 y.o. and have lost a few brain
cells. No, he hasn't made any backups although he did copy some files to
thumb drives.

Oh, he lives an hour away and doesn't drive at night. I hardly drive at
all these days.

Thanks.


The Windows "repair" routine at boot time, is a *three* pass process.

Each time the computer fails to boot, the repair
process tries different things. So after three boot
attempts, this is what it's done...

1) first failure, maybe repair the BCD.
2) second failure ???
3) third failure runs CHKDSK, and it reads each and every
stinking sector. This is why you don't want that C: partition
to be 1TB large. Keep your C: partition down to maybe 60GB or so,
and then the third repair pass will take less time.

If you try to reboot over and over again, the
third attempt will be slower than the others.

After three attempts, it'll give up and tell
you to call a priest.

*******

Note that Macrium Reflect Free, the emergency boot CD that the
program makes, it has a menu item called "boot repair". That's
similar to (1) above.

I've discovered, by various dumb experiments, that the combination
of doing the Macrium boot repair, followed by the Windows boot
repair, increases the odds of the partition booting again.
Exactly what's going on there, I haven't a clue. And if you
only do one of the two (use Macrium by itself), neither of them
gets it right all by themselves. But a one-two punch seems
to work. This is mainly for cases where the BCD got corrupted
somehow. And in cases where I was working on this, I wasn't
really in a mood for forensics, and seeing what broke :-)

If you boot the Windows installer DVD, or if you boot
the emergency boot CD that the "Windows 7 backup" dialog
offers, there is a maintenance icon in there that
handles repair. So you can check that out for fun, if
you're not booting.

Startup Repair on Windows CD or DVD

https://www.tenforums.com/attachment...up_options.png

From this article

https://www.tenforums.com/attachment...up_options.png

If you want to manually invoke Startup Repair,
there's an icon for that.

*******

Let's take a dumb example:

1) User tried three times to boot.
Call a priest message shows up. Uh oh.

2) Boot emergency CD and open Command Prompt.
You can run CHKDSK from there if you want,
or fool around.

3) Boot Macrium Reflect Free CD. Run the boot repair.

4) Boot the Windows emergency CD or the Windows
installer DVD. Find the Startup Repair icon
and finish what Macrium started. On your
next reboot, it might boot again.

There is actually a metric ton of fun things to
do now, when the computer is broken. In (2) for
example, you can do an offline DISM run (repair
WinSXS), or do an offline sfc /scannow. As well
as do offline BCD work. (The boot repair will
have already tried this in (1) so you don't
have to.) There have been some improvements
over what the other OS versions support.

HTH,
Paul

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