Question Windows 10 won’t boot, windows recovery cannot repair my pc

[techantifa]

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with windows 10. I was using it today and suddenly the internet went down. I thought it was the whole network but realized it was just my laptop. Everything else worked fine though. I decided to restart to fix it, but the laptop immediately went to automatically repair upon boot up. Each time it said it was unable to repair the computer. I rebooted several times with the same result.

So far I’ve tried going into advanced options cmd and doing sfc /scannow but it says “windows could not perform the requested operation”. I’m currently running chkdsk /r c: which appears to be working although it looks like it will be 6+ hours.

What do you think is wrong? Is there anything else I should be trying? I have important data that I want to recover should I have to do a clean install. I have the main ssd c drive and there’s also a 2 tb hard drive that I want to make sure is recoverable. Thanks for any advice.

 

[Lutfij]

Either the OS got corrupt or your drive is failing. If you can, perhaps see if you can perform a system restore prior to when the issue cropped up. Can you get into Safe Mode? Since the 2TB is a physical drive, you're free to disconnect the drive from the laptop and then proceed to get into Safe Mode, then backup mission critical data from your C drive.

 

[techantifa]

Either the OS got corrupt or your drive is failing. If you can, perhaps see if you can perform a system restore prior to when the issue cropped up. Can you get into Safe Mode? Since the 2TB is a physical drive, you're free to disconnect the drive from the laptop and then proceed to get into Safe Mode, then backup mission critical data from your C drive.

Sorry for the delay, had to finish chkdsk. The scan finished and said no errors were found but it was not able to save it to a log file. I then ran bootrec /rebuildbcd and it says “total identified windows installations: 0. The operation completed successfully.” I also tried to shutdown the computer using the shutdown command and it said the command could not be found which is really weird. I’m guessing this all means the whole os is dead?

I have the option under advanced recovery to reset windows and choose to keep or delete my data. Will that work? I’m okay with reinstalling as long as I have that windows.old folder. I’m hesitant to try system restore as some of the files I need were modified today. Thanks.

Update:
I have a major update. I was trying out some more commands and realized windows is not finding almost any of it’s system files or directories, so I just did a dir c:\ out of curiosity, and the contents of c: is actually all the personal files on my 2 tb hd (drive letter D) none of which are system files. So then I did dir D: and it shows all of the C: system files including the Windows folder. Somehow the drive letters got switched around? Do I just rename the drive letters? This is so weird. All the files appear intact

 

[onespeedbiker]

Do you have more than one drive, or one drive divided into two logical drives? If you have two drives, determine which drive has your boot partition, as drives usually don't randomly change drive letters. It may be your drive is failing.