Solved Broken boot

If you can, make an image of just the C: drive partition to an external drive. Then do a clean install of Windows 11. If the computer boots and everything is working restore the image of the old C: partition over the new C: drive partition.

As you have a Macrium reflect boot able rescue drive you can make a partition image of the D: drive and save on another drive.
Mount the image and see it you can copy your data from C:\users\NAME to another drive
Then you do a clean install, deleting ALL partitions on the NVMe drive.
Once win 11 is installed, restore all your data from the image you created with Macrium reflect.

Once you have Win11 installed with all your programs and data, use Macrium reflect to create a drive partitions image to use as backup

Please boot your computer with Windows Setup Media and from Windows Recovery Environment start the Command Prompt.

Please type the below command into Command Prompt and press the Enter key.

The following command will fix errors on the disk.





Please replace partition letter C: with Windows installed partition letter. When the computer boots into Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) environment, the drive letter assign to Windows partition may not be C: drive letter because Windows 7, 8 , 8.1 and 10 creates a separate system partition when it's installed from scratch. The system partition contains boot files WinRE assigns the system partition the C: drive letter and the Windows installed partition will be assigned any other drive letter, usually D: drive letter is assign to Windows installed partition. The Bcdedit | find "osdevice" command can be used to find out the drive letter of the Windows installed partition, the output of the Bcdedit command is similar to this osdevice partition=D:. The drive letter after partition= is the drive letter of the Windows partition.




Please boot your computer with Windows Setup Media and from Windows Recovery Environment start the Command Prompt.

Please type the below command into Command Prompt and press the Enter key.

The following command scans integrity of all protected Windows system files and repairs files with problems when possible.




Please replace partition letter C: with Windows installed partition letter. When the computer boots into Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) environment, the drive letter assign to Windows partition may not be C: drive letter because Windows 7, 8 , 8.1 and 10 creates a separate system partition when it's installed from scratch. The system partition contains boot files WinRE assigns the system partition the C: drive letter and the Windows installed partition will be assigned any other drive letter, usually D: drive letter is assign to Windows installed partition. The Bcdedit | find "osdevice" command can be used to find out the drive letter of the Windows installed partition, the output of the Bcdedit command is similar to this osdevice partition=D:. The drive letter after partition= is the drive letter of the Windows partition.



If you open the log file, you’ll be shown details of all the tests performed by Startup Repair, with any errors discovered detailed. We can use this information to help diagnose and get to the root cause of the problem.



To open log file from the Windows Recovery Environment, click and open the Command Prompt. When the Command Prompt is open, type Notepad and press Enter key to open the Notepad application. The Startup Repair log file is located at:






You will need to navigate to the drive on which you have Windows installed (usually the C: drive) to see the SrtTrail.txt log file.

As others have alluded to, you can boot the computer from your Macrium Refelct USB drive that you created. You can then save an image of the damaged Windows partition to another drive. Then you can do a clean install of Windows, install Macrium Reflect in the new install of Windows. That will allow you to mount the image of your damaged Windows partition and copy files out of the image.

My feeling is that your Windows partition is damaged beyond repair.

The disk is write protected message on a disk drive that was not set for write protection often indicates problems with the partition.
Attempt data recovery: recoverit, disk genius, Minitool partition wizard, professional recovery, etc.

So I can not make an image of C: partition using Macrium. Saying: MFT corrupt - Error code = 6. Please run "chkdsk C: /r"
And this can not do as the drive is write protected.
I need another way to access data.
And Windows to Go from USB drive somehow I am not able to boot. After setting language, country etc there is some message that system was restarted and they will fix it when I install updates, so I have to connect to internet, but it is connected and it is doing nothing after 2 tries, same end point.

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I can disable verification of the integrity of file systems in Macrium and create backup, but not sure how reliable and usable such backup will be.

Eddward said:

I can disable verification of the integrity of file systems in Macrium and create backup, but not sure how reliable and usable such backup will be.

Click to expand...

You can probably mount image as a drive to recover most of your data but you will not be able to restore image.

Probably easier to boot from a live linux drive and copy what data you can recover to an external drive.

Yes, at the moment that is my plan to mount this image in laptop and see what can I do. But have to think about how to verify that data are okay. To see files is one thing, if they are usable is second.

Live linux probably yes, but I have no experience with this. But maybe I can do this with some tutorial and try to copy data as a second backup.

A live Linux won't be much different from windows as a GUI.

Will try, is there any quick guide ?

In the meantime I have image from Macrium mounted in laptop. Everything seems to be there, but I have problem to access my Users\MyName folder as I do not have permissions. I believe files are there but unaccessable for me. Is there any way to open it ?

edit:
managed to solve it... needed to check enable access to restricted folders and make writeable while mounting image... everything is there... will check then

Create on the laptop a user with same name (Users\MyName), log on with it and you will have permissions to it.

Whatever files are corrupted will be corrupted regardless if you try to copy them from a live Linux flash drive or from a Macrium Reflex image. The results are going to be the same.

NavyLCDR said:

Whatever files are corrupted will be corrupted regardless if you try to copy them from a live Linux flash drive or from a Macrium Reflex image. The results are going to be the same.

Click to expand...

Sure - however, I have doubts OP will get an image though - it will probably bomb out before completion.

Of course, OP could use the Reflect PE Explorer to copy the files, but whilst useful at finding a few files and copying them, it is rather non intuitive to navigate around and copy lots of files.

Yep, not going with Linux as the results will be the same.... it seems that I have access to everything now from windows environment so I can play with it.... maybe just windows files are corrupted and not user data, so far I can open everything... there were just 4 file segments corrupted as you can see on previous page from chkdsk but anyway, clean install and restore date from this image is the best thing I can do at this point right ?
Do you think I can try to restore whole image using Macrium after clean install ? Is is worth ?Will this even start or will it restore corrupted image again ? Just curious how it works, since I disabled integrity verification while doing image.

Hopefully there is no hardware damage on the disk.

Sure - however, I have doubts OP will get an image though - it will probably bomb out before completion.

Of course, OP could use the Reflect PE Explorer to copy the files, but whilst useful at finding a few files and copying them, it is rather non intuitive to navigate around and copy lots of files.

Click to expand...

It has completed. I have full image, but with some corrupted stuff in it as explained before. From first look everything looks okay what I need to restore.

Fpr those that do not know, on MSI motherboards, the boot menu key is F11. F12 is for Gigabyte motherboards (possibly ASUS as well). OP can try F11 during boot up to access boot menu options.

Just information

F11 will give me 2 options:
1. Windows Boot Manager (Samsung SSD 970)
2. Enter Setup
First option will do nothing, just blink and will stay on this. Second option is UEFI.

A Macrium Reflect image is like a Zip file. Instead of compacting a file or a folder it compacts a hole partition or even a drive.
As I already wrote, once you have finished a clean install (delete all partitions) boot from the Macrium Reflect drive and restore your data from the backed up image created.

Windows can be installed in two ways: Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT
To install as Legacy-MBR you must boot the installation drive as Legacy
To install as UEFI-GPT you must boot the installation drive as UEFI.

As you have a UEFI BIOS, you should install as UEFI-GPT
Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB.

During POST, press F12(?) to launch the boot menu. You will see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name). Select USB UEFI (Name).
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the main drive till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.

I keep a bootable Linux Mint usb on hand for just such scenarios when I need to perform file recovery. I run Mint from the usb and am able to copy and paste files I want to save onto external media in a folder structure. It's saved my bacon many times when working on other people's computers and there wasn't any backup procedure in place.

@Megahertz thanks a lot, will do like you suggested, that was my plan more or less... with installation I am more familiar. I have already prepared USB drive Win 11 image with Rufus as UEFI GPT compatible. Second SATA Data drive is unplugged and LAN as well as I want local account.

So once the installation of Win will be completed and will boot to desktop I can restart pc and boot Macrium reflect tool from USB and try to restore image from External HDD right ?
I am just wondering how it will work due to corrupted file segments from previous installation.

On the clean install, create the user with the same name as before so you don't have ownership issues.

I never use Rufus. I let MCT create the Win 11 installation drive.