Question Fixing boot problem to upgrade to windows 11

[Yossi W]

I have a dell XPS that has had a boot issue since I re-installed windows on it on a new HDD. long story let me describe what is going on - I'm not sure what to set the UEFI BIOS boot location to - when I set it to what I think is the windows location it works for a while until the next update - and then it breaks again in this way:

• Computer fails to find windows upon boot, displays blue error screen - with either otption to go into BIOS or boot to recovery.
• When I choose recovery, system reboots and eventually loads up recovery environment. I choose english language, and then the menu shows an option to boot into windows.
• Choosing this option, system boots just fine and I can work just fine

So I have been living with this issue as I don't reboot every day. But for Windows 11 upgrade, now the recovery environment only shows the option to roll back to windows 10 so I can't upgrade.

I have tried the Visual BCD tool and other power tools with no success up to now. And all the recovery console commands to repair BCD etc. Nothing has been a persistent fix which survives a windows update.

Any suggestions besides a complete wipe and re-install? one more thing - I did move the recovery partition manually from Dell's original HDD to my SSD.

 

[Colif]

how did you move it manually?

can you right click start
choose disk management
expand next window to show all columns of upper and lower areas
take a screenshot and upload to an image sharing website, and show link here.

Something isn't right here.

 

[Yossi W]

Disk Management picture is here :

https://imgur.com/a/rv6KkAt

View: https://imgur.com/a/rv6KkAt

https://imgur.com/a/rv6KkAt

 

[Colif]

i assume winretools was the partition you created? sounds like its another recovery drive of sorts or perhaps used if you did a factory reset as it might have extra drivers in it. Windows probably doesn't even know its there.

it being there might trip over updates as they are installed onto the recovery partition before being installed, and recovery drive is at end of drive to allow it to grow. On older win 10 installs the order was
recovery drive/efi/windows
they changed it recently to
EFI/Windows/recovery to allow recovery to expand if its needed.

boot location... should be the efi partition. Its normally the partition marked system (I compared yours to my install and its same descriptions in the brakets on the windows drive

 

[Yossi W]

Thanks this may be the issue but it looks like the first partition with EFI is already active. Here is another view of my disk:

https://imgur.com/a/63IWCEu