The machine is a Core i7 running Server 2019 (aka Windows 10 RS5 1809 17763) Unfortunately I got called in to revive it after this started happening, no idea what caused it, was working last week. They have no backup and it's the sole domain controller, a very low budget operation with no full-time IT and I'm trying to help out. I have tried the following steps: - move hard drives to identical spare known working hardware to rule out hardware failure. - boot to troubleshooting command prompt and chkdsk /f the partitions, no errors found - attempted boot in safe mode, same crash happens. Clean install is not a good option, as there's no other domain controller to recover from and they never made a backup to restore from. I am afraid what needs to happen is to somehow replace the OS files, perhaps by attaching the drive to a working machine and then running some dism command line? I am out of my depth here, before I break it further I thought I'd check if you folks have any suggestions?
The only way I would go is to make a 100% Clone of the System HDD to a new clean HDD BEFORE doing anything! Done that I would checkout with that cloned HDD if the same errors occur with that Clone HDD as on the original HDD. Just be sure, the HDD for the clone is totally empty, best is using a brand new HDD or, at least zeroing it before use and check for bad and slow sectors too! Now having a 2. identical HDD to play with its time to find out what the error is. There should be several error log files that you must check to get an idea of what you're dealing with! To get more help, you will need to post the errors, etc. so the MDL'r could see what is going on and provide more help Good Luck!
Times like this make me wish doing a repair install was still an option. Back in the XP days if a system could not boot you could take an XP disk/USB drive at the same or newer patch lever and install over the top often completely fixing a system without impacting user data or apps. Try that today and you get a message that this needs to be done from desktop, the thing you are trying to fix and currently cannot reach.
Most of the DISM references I find use /online but you are also supposed to be able to use /image:[path] I mounted a copy of the drive as G: in a working system running the same OS and tried to do various commands such as: dism /image:G:\ /cleanup-image /checkhealth dism /image:G:\ /cleanup-image /restorehealth sfc /scannow /offbootdir=G:\ /offwindir=G:\windows Everything always fails instantly with error 2.
Thanks for all the input. Here's what I ended up doing. - copied it to a VHDX file using disk2vhd from Russinovich. - Attached it as "G" - went to G:\windows\system32\config and copied the files from the regback folder over the existing corrupted ones - Detached it - built a new virtual machine with the VHDX - boot was successful! Could probably have done it on the physical drive, but I wanted to virtualize that machine anyway.