Windows 10 Won't Boot (Possibly Corrupt Registry)

[TeamPlayer22]

I was attempting to clone a hard drive to an SSD on an HP laptop. I used Disk Management to shrink the drive partition down to the smallest it would go and made sure there wasn't to much data on the HD for the 240GB SSD. When I attempted to use Acronis Clone software it gave me an error. I ran defragmentation on the original drive to clean it up and then ran error checking. It found an error and said it needed to restart to fix the error. I restarted and it ran the automatic repair and said the repair would take an hour. After 5 hours I shut the computer off and tried to restart. It went straight back to the automatic repair and won't go further.

 

I pulled out the original hard drive, put it in a USB enclosure, plugged it into a working Windows 10 desktop and ran the error checking. It found an error and said it fixed it. I plugged the hard drive back in the laptop's drive bay and booted it up. No luck. It went straight to automatic repair.

I went to recovery options and opened the command prompt. I tired bootrec.exe /fixmbr and bootrec.exe /fixboot. No good. I tried bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd boot it showed that there was 0 Windows installations on the drive.

Finally I tried Automatic Repair. Not surprisingly, it didn't work. But I kept the log file which I will link. It pointed towards a corrupt registry.

HEELLP!

 

https://1drv.ms/t/s!AhrVjwlyjxjOhgBXyBa0Qd1ExR6m

 

 

Key Section:

 

Root cause found: 
---------------------------
Registry is corrupt.

Repair action: Registry roll back
Result: Failed. Error code =  0x2
Time taken = 31 ms

[pwn_intended]

If acronis gave you an error DURING the cloning process, youre gonna have to re-clone, and make sure that it completes successfully. No amount of registry repairing will fix an incomplete setup.

[Enderman]

Don't clone.

Format it and clean install windows.

[TeamPlayer22]

9 minutes ago, pwn_intended said:

If acronis gave you an error DURING the cloning process, youre gonna have to re-clone, and make sure that it completes successfully. No amount of registry repairing will fix an incomplete setup.

I'm dealing with the original hard drive. There is no cloned hard drive/SSD yet.

[TeamPlayer22]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Don't clone.

Format it and clean install windows.

The corrupt registry is on the original drive. I'm trying to find a way to repair it. Possibly using command prompt. I'd prefer to not have to reinstall the programs at all costs.

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, TeamPlayer22 said:

The corrupt registry is on the original drive. I'm trying to find a way to repair it. Possibly using command prompt. I'd prefer to not have to reinstall the programs at all costs.

It's bad practice and you will still have issues in the future (probably different kinds of issues too).

You should be doing a clean install at least every 2 years to keep things running well.

[TeamPlayer22]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

It's bad practice and you will still have issues in the future (probably different kinds of issues too).

You should be doing a clean install at least every 2 years to keep things running well.

I would gladly do a clean install, but I'd prefer to make a system image/full backup first. To do that, I need to get this thing to boot up to desktop. Is there any command I can run that will repair the registry?

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, TeamPlayer22 said:

I would gladly do a clean install, but I'd prefer to make a system image/full backup first. To do that, I need to get this thing to boot up to desktop. Is there any command I can run that will repair the registry?

You don't need to be able to boot, you can plug the drive into a working system and copy it to another empty drive, or you can just open it in file explorer and copy paste what files you want to keep somewhere else.

The drive will just show up as any regular data drive that you can move files to and from.

[TeamPlayer22]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

You don't need to be able to boot, you can plug the drive into a working system and copy it to another empty drive, or you can just open it in file explorer and copy paste what files you want to keep somewhere else.

The drive will just show up as any regular data drive that you can move files to and from.

Would it be possible to do an "in place" upgrade so I can reinstall Windows 10 without losing the programs?

[Enderman]

Just now, TeamPlayer22 said:

Would it be possible to do an "in place" upgrade so I can reinstall Windows 10 without losing the programs?

No, a clean install wipes everything.

That's what's so good about it and fixes all software problems instantly.

[TeamPlayer22]

5 minutes ago, Enderman said:

No, a clean install wipes everything.

That's what's so good about it and fixes all software problems instantly.

Okay. I've heard I may be able to do an "upgrade" installation on Windows 10. Basically I'll be upgrading my operating system to the same version which 'should' reinstall the Windows files, while leaving the programs and documents untouched. Have you heard of this?

[SkilledRebuilds]

3 minutes ago, TeamPlayer22 said:

Okay. I've heard I may be able to do an "upgrade" installation on Windows 10. Basically I'll be upgrading my operating system to the same version which 'should' reinstall the Windows files, while leaving the programs and documents untouched. Have you heard of this?

You could do this with Win98, just install over the top, programs work fine, corrupted files sorted....problem solved...

 

However....

It may also leave underlying problems untouched....

[Enderman]

6 minutes ago, TeamPlayer22 said:

Okay. I've heard I may be able to do an "upgrade" installation on Windows 10. Basically I'll be upgrading my operating system to the same version which 'should' reinstall the Windows files, while leaving the programs and documents untouched. Have you heard of this?

Upgrading is another horrible practice which should never be done because it causes many issues...

[SkilledRebuilds]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Upgrading is another horrible practice which should never be done because it causes many issues...

Over 20 upgrades done in the "FREE WIN10" few months every client wanted it....

1-2 Succeeded FULLY (Freshly installed base Win10 as well on these working machines) The rest had issues and got another format to do it right.

Upgrading is beyond annoying at the best of times.... worse on older installs of Windows.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

Over 20 upgrades done in the "FREE WIN10" few months every client wanted it....

1-2 Succeeded FULLY (Freshly installed base Win10 as well on these working machines) The rest had issues and got another format to do it right.

Upgrading is beyond annoying at the best of times.... worse on older installs of Windows.

It's a broken potato. Thanks microsoft  you tried.

[TeamPlayer22]

39 minutes ago, Enderman said:

It's a broken potato. Thanks microsoft  you tried.

Very well. I'll try to back up everything on the drive. At that point I won't have much to lose. Either the in place upgrade will work, or it won't. I have on last question. Is there anyway to tell if the operating sytem was 32 or 64-bit from the command prompt or operating system files?

[Enderman]

28 minutes ago, TeamPlayer22 said:

Very well. I'll try to back up everything on the drive. At that point I won't have much to lose. Either the in place upgrade will work, or it won't. I have on last question. Is there anyway to tell if the operating sytem was 32 or 64-bit from the command prompt or operating system files?

It's almost certainly 64 bit, unless for some reason the computer is 15 years old.