We were away for the weekend, and my partner's Windows 10 PC was shut down, but now won't boot. It gets stuck at the spinning white dots.
I've tried following instructions here using an install DVD to backup the various boot records and rewrite them.
Each time I run bootrec /scanos it shows 0 identified Windows installations, but after moving c:\boot\bcd and running bootrec /rebuildbcd, I get output as below:
Scanning all disks for Windows installations.
Please wait, since this may take a while...
Successfully scanned Windows installations.
Total identified Windows installations: 1
[1] C:\Windows
Add installation to boot list? Yes<Y>/No<N>/All<A>:
After hitting yes, it says that the operation was successful, but subsequent calls to bootrec /scanos show 0 identified Windows installations.
I then booted a Gparted live disk, which said that there were errors with the filesystem that needed to be repaired with chkdsk. I ran chkdsk and it found 7 orphan files and reindexed them.
Subsequently rebooted Gparted and it can now read the filesystem just fine. I mounted the C drive as read-only and am now copying user data to an external USB.
The drive's contents also look a bit weird, in that there's a WindowsUpgrade folder, last modified at ~3:20am while we were away. I suspect that the PC turned on while we were away and a Windows Update went wrong.
I also looked at this question, but there are only two partitions on the primary SSD, one 240GB one with the data and one 885MB one. There is also 1.34 MB of space that shows up as unallocated.
Does anyone know why it would be refusing to boot, even though the filesystem appears readable? Is the partitioning the problem?
Are there more useful diagnostics I can collect, either from Gparted Live or the Windows repair command prompt? I'm a C coder and do a bit of Linux sysadmin stuff at work, but not really familiar with the equivalent stuff for Windows.
