Question Repair a non-booting Win10 hard drive on another Win10 PC

[M1ckr1ck]

A friend's Win10 laptop stopped booting a couple of weeks after Windows updates were installed. Now it just keeps going to the "preparing automatic restore" screen, before failing. None of the advanced repair options are working. I created a installation usb stick and tried to do a repair using that, but that failed without even reaching the repair stage. So now I have the hard drive in a usb caddy and want to try repairing it while connected to my own Win10 pc. I've looked everywhere for a guide to do this, but I can't find anything other than sites which claim to repair broken installations with their own paid software. Is there anyway to do this other than a full reinstall?

 

[RealBeast]

Do a clean re-installation, you will spend loads of time and not get results. Just unallocate the drive in your Disk Management, reinstall, and do the clean install.

And it may be a good time to discuss backup if that is an issue here.

 

[M1ckr1ck]

Do a clean re-installation, you will spend loads of time and not get results. Just unallocate the drive in your Disk Management, reinstall, and do the clean install.

And it may be a good time to discuss backup if that is an issue here.

Hi. Thanks for your reply.

I ended up just doing a clean install. For all the software he had installed on it, it seemed like the path of least resistance. But then I hadn't counted on the thousands of photos and songfiles he had on his desktop. Which just HAD to be backed up and restored. It took me the best part of a weekend to back everything up, and then copy it all back across when the rebuild was done. And in doing so, I discovered there were 4 bad sectors on the drive. Probably the reason why the drive had failed so catastrophically.

On the subject of backups. I have been doing work like this for the same guy for well over 20 years. Any time he gets a new piece of software I get asked to install it. A piece of hardware stops working the way he likes it? I sort it out. I have told hime god on ly knows how many imes, to back his hard drive up. Once a week, take a ghost image. Leave it running when you go to bed. Nope. And its yours truly who ends up having to sort the mess out every time. The drawbacks of having worked in the sector for 30 years.