After installing 6456, one of my installs is so broken that a repair install fails. The errors I'm having mostly involve store apps failing to launch, reinstalling them changes nothing. I'm also getting strange hangs and stutters that I wasn't having before. In my entire history of using Windows 10 and helping countless people with issues, this is only the 3rd time ever I've had a bootable system fail to run a repair install. I'm going to try a few more things before I call it quits on this install.
Wow, the system is really damaged. You could use DDU to reinstall from scratch the Audio and GPU drivers. As you said, you could try to jump direct to the unstable and AI-controlled Windows 11 as the last resort. But I recommend you to save your stuff and reinstall Win10 LTSC 2021 when you have some free time.
I don't run stock 11. Its pretty OK if you rip all of the crap you never touch out of it. I even DSIMed my current drivers into the install.wim and boot.wim files hoping that would forces Windows to use what are otherwise rock solid and stable drivers. No dice, same BSOD on reboot.
I agree, I also uninstall all the apps. Although some of them have their uses. But the UWP apps are not the problem, it's the AI that a lot of people seem to love. Some of them would pray and ask to fusion themselves with the machine. Those people are simply lost. They will suffer even more than their current suffering (age, illness, etc.). Anyway, I recommend you to not integrate any driver in the ISO. Sincerely, you only need GPU and Audio driver, in my case: NVIDIA and Creative SB Command (Sound Blaster); maybe Printer and Webcam in some cases. LAN, Wi-Fi, USB-Card and many more are automatically installed with Windows Update, and they work out-of-the-box even when you install Windows without any Internet connection (of course I'm talking about USB-Card).
Nothings is making a difference. I am getting access denied errors in event logs so I suspect that I have corrupted permissions somewhere. I might try a full chkdsk and then that brute force trick where you give every file, folder and registry allow all to all users. It doesn't really matter at this point, going to clean install either way.
"I might try a full chkdsk and then that brute force trick where you give every file, folder and registry allow all to all users."
About 90% sure that's where I'm going to end up but it's annoying to backup and restore stuff. I'm also super stubborn about giving up on an install. It's been quite some time since I've seen an install so broken that it resisted even a repair install. The last time I saw this (about 7 years ago on my wife's laptop) I was able to save things. It was borked permissions back then and I'm pretty sure that's what's wrong this time too.
Everything is fine with the drive, the OS was corrupted. This is an Optane drive BTW, so endurance is a non-issue. The upgrade to 11 worked fine, not sure if I'll stick with it. Store was still completely broken but unlike when I was in 10, the store fixes actually worked in 11.
Welp, upgrade to 11 fixed half of what was broken but enabled Windows Store fixes to actually work. Everything works now, but I might just reinstall 10 anyway now that I'm satisfied that its fixed. Things actually went downhill further before I gave up and upgraded to 11. Process explorer started failing to launch and the event logs were a never ending sea of random 'access denied' errors.
Did you try an inplace upgrade of the original OS telling it to keep your files as an option first? That's saved many a borked windows for me in the past.