Installation and Upgrade Repair Install Windows 11 with an In-place Upgrade

@POLYSIUS I think you misread her post: She configured Disk Space as 9.31 GB, not 930 GB. The SFC report confirms that she has the Restore Points storage (Shadow Copy Storage Space) set to 9.31 GB.

@AnnieB
I currently have four (4) Restore Points, and the total space used for those is about 6 GB, so 9.31 GB should be adequate for keeping a small supply of RPs. The oldest will be discarded when you exceed your preset limit of 9.31 GB.

If your diskmanagement screenshot from post #189 is that what you got from your PC-Shop I wouldn't accept at all!
They don't know how to set up a safe system!
If you want to learn how to set up a new system we can continue. Therefore follow my advice in post 190 to safe your drivers.

Wisewiz said:

@POLYSIUS I think you misread her post: She configured Disk Space as 9.31 GB, not 930 GB. The SFC report confirms that she has the Restore Points storage (Shadow Copy Storage Space) set to 9.31 GB.

@AnnieB
I currently have four (4) Restore Points, and the total space used for those is about 6 GB, so 9.31 GB should be adequate for keeping a small supply of RPs. The oldest will be discarded when you exceed your preset limit of 9.31 GB.

Click to expand...

Thank you @Wisewiz

Are you able to comment on whether I am going to have issues with originally having two C: partitions and now not be able to perform scannow because a repair is pending but a reboot doesn't solve it. I wonder if I should have rebooted before unprotecting the C: (Missing) partition.

POLYSIUS said:

If your diskmanagement screenshot from post #189 is that what you got from your PC-Shop I wouldn't accept at all!
They don't know how to set up a safe system!
If you want to learn how to set up a new system we can continue. Therefore follow my advice in post 190 to safe your drivers.

Click to expand...

I have just checked the Disk Management again and it looks the same as I posted before but I didn't take a look when I first restored the backup image today so perhaps it was something I did with these partitions just now. I will try to reinstate the initial backup image again tomorrow and see what Disk Management looks like then.

I would like to tell the shop about this problem so I wonder if you could please explain what I need to say to them and what exactly is wrong?

Wisewiz said:

@POLYSIUS I think you misread her post: She configured Disk Space as 9.31 GB, not 930 GB. The SFC report confirms that she has the Restore Points storage (Shadow Copy Storage Space) set to 9.31 GB.

Click to expand...

@Wisewiz
I wrote in post #199: "It is 9,31 GB because you (C:) partition is too big! 930 GB!!!
The sfc reports that a reboot is necessary

The SFC report confirms that she has the Restore Points storage (Shadow Copy Storage Space) set to 9.31 GB.
No Sir! The vssadmin list shadowstorage reports that

If you're asking whether eliminating the bogus C: drive in the System Protection window is anything to worry about, my guess would be NO. As for the pending repair, the only thing I can think of at the moment is to try another reboot and then open terminal and try SFC /scannow again.

Wisewiz said:

If you're asking whether eliminating the bogus C: drive in the System Protection window is anything to worry about, my guess would be NO. As for the pending repair, the only thing I can think of at the moment is to try another reboot and then open terminal and try SFC /scannow again.

Click to expand...

Thanks. A reboot doesn't help andf I get the same again unfortunately.

When you set up a new system you have a Recovery Partition appr. 600-700 MB in size.
In my screenshot #187 you see that I have 1000 MB for a good reason.
Whenever you run an Inplacement the system creates a new Recovery Partition when your basic Recovery Partition is too small.
You have a Partition of 633 MB but it's not a Recovery Partition.

Beside that , if you bring the PC back to your store you can't be sure that they know what they do.
It takes 2 days till you get it back.

If you run your own setup, you learn s.th. and you are ready after 1 hour!

If you decide to run your own setup, I prepare a setup script for the correct partitioning as MS suggests it.

I will be back tomorrow. There is time to decide.

I have just upgraded an unsupported and old laptop from 22H2 to 23H2 using Rufus with all the bypasses checked. It would only offer a clean install if I booted from the USB. But when I booted into 22H2 and ran setup from the USB it worked perfectly. It did take all night due to the lowly spec of my system 2, especially its USB 2 ports! It even kept the password on my local account.

Well it worked. that's the main thing.

I have been reading this discussion, although I've tried to keep it to only the posts since the beginning of October. I really can't spend my entire life reading discussions in here. In any case, I believe I am reporting something new. But I hope somebody else is experiencing this & can help me.

I only just a couple of days ago installed W11 & got it working. I've already done THREE repair installs. It took about 7 or 8 YEARS using W7 before I needed to do a repair install & that held for almost 3 years until I decommissioned that system a few days ago in favor of this W11 on a new computer (which I built, so I installed W11 myself). This is, to say the least, a less than auspicious beginning. Just for the record, it's W11 Pro 64-bit 23H2 with whatever maintenance Microsoft has pushed out in the last few days. Almost. I do have a handful of things waiting for me to install them. I'll do that before I go to bed. I've already done entirely too many reboots today.

So why 3 times? Let me tell you the saga. After about a day & a half of more or less flawless operation, suddenly, for no reason I can discern, the Windows key on my keyboard stopped opening the Start Menu. Clicking on it with the mouse didn't open it either. The rest of the system worked fine as far as I could tell. I was able to come in here & get a crash course in repair installing. First, I tried to do it from my USB install media. But that ended up in an endless loop of not actually getting to the point of repairing anything. So I used the Settings dialog & ran it from there, as detailed in typical exemplary Brink fashion upthread.

Now be warned. A Repair Install REMOVES YOUR INSTALLED APPLICATIONS. My W7 repair install didn't do that. And the tutorial above claims that it wouldn't do that. BUT IT DOES. Be warned. It TELLS YOU it's going to remove your installed applications. In my case, that even included my NVidia video/audio driver. It gives you a list of what it's going to nuke, which you would do well to write down on a piece of paper. But this process removes your applications. Here's what I get on my system.



My suspicion is that 23H2 introduced these changes. Why? Why does Microsoft do this to us? Whatever. Back to my narrative.

This makes a repair install very much something you should think more than twice about before you do one. Your data is preserved. Hooray for that. But your applications will be toasted. Fortunately, I have the install executables of all my apps saved on one of my hard drives. So at least I don't have to go download them every time. Still, I have to reinstall things repeatedly. So there's another thing you should do: collect together all your install executables for easy re-installation.

My W7 repair install took pretty much a whole day. This W11 repair took about half an hour. It helps that I've now got a 13th generation Intel i9 with a bucket of internal cores. But as I've already said in my spoiler, I wasn't done.

Why was I not done? After the repair install, my Start Menu returned to correct functionality. But I found I couldn't make any file associations. I kept getting this dialog.



This dialog ignores all mouse clicks. It ignores all keyboard input. It sits on top of any other window you might have open. You can't drag it out of the way. It refuses to close. It requires a reboot to clear. It leaves me unable to associate any of my applications, which I have been forced to install multiple times now, with any file types. If I double click or just hit Enter on any program in a File Manager window, this stupid dialog pops up. I get the same zombie dialog trying to make file associations from the place in Settings where you can do that. I am forced to be super careful about breaking years-long habits. In order to open a file, I have to open the application instead, then use the file selection dialog from within the app to open the file. It doesn't matter whether I just want to type up a text file or I want to play a video or I want to open a zip archive. I have to open the app, not the file. Otherwise, this zombie dialog would render my system nearly unusable. Even capturing that image was a feat. With that thing obscuring everything on my desktop, I had to use my second monitor to grab it & save it. My second monitor is my TV. It's great for watching videos but as a computer monitor, it's a pain. It's on the other side of the room from my desk, where my keyboard & mouse are. And what is easily readable on my primary monitor from a couple of feet away requires much squinting on the TV.

So I felt like I had to do Repair Install #2. It did NOT cure this problem. I have to comment that I don't think the Settings program is terribly stable. It seems to have a nasty habit of just freezing up & closing in the middle of something I'm doing. Nothing else on my system is prone to this. It's the kind of symptom you'd be likely to put down to overclocking tweaks in the BIOS that have not been good. I don't know enough to make any BIOS tweaks to overclock anything. I've left everything under the overclocking section at box standard defaults. But like I said, this instability is limited to Settings. Everything else runs fine. At least Settings just freezes up for a bit, then closes. I don't see a pattern. It happens at random on different screens of settings. Mercifully, there's no other zombies running around.

So after repair install #2 failed to correct this problem, I said I should follow my own advice. Never accept a single failure as definitive. Always try something twice. But, you say, you already did this twice. Why do it a third time? Because the first time actually cured the problem it was intended to cure: the disappearance of my Start Menu. So this third repair was going to be only the second attempt to cure the zombie dialog problem.

You will likely be surprised in no way whatsoever to learn that repair #3 didn't cure squat. The zombie dialog is still here.

A couple of times during my all too frequent reboots, W11 put up a message during shutdown that "task host" was delaying the shutdown. I patiently waited the few extra seconds it took for that to clear. But I saw it more than once so it stuck in my mind. I thought maybe there's something in the Task Manager that I can kill to maybe put a wooden stake through the heart of this zombie. So I purposely created the zombie. On the primary monitor, of course. Then opened Task Manager on the TV. I squinted at what was there. I was looking for taskhost.exe, something I have noticed in the past. I found a couple of things that might have been it. I didn't have anything named taskhost.exe. I ended them. I didn't care if that caused some sort of problem elsewhere in the system. I had closed everything except Task Manager -- and the zombie, of course -- & was headed for a reboot anyway. So I figured I could do all the damage I wanted, & the planned reboot would cure it all.

Then I noticed this in Task Manager:



So I ended it. Poof. Magic. The zombie went away! No more repair installs! At least, until something else comes up. Which I sure hope doesn't happen any time soon.

Speaking of two monitors. I have discovered rather the hard way that it's not enough to just power off the other monitor. A Repair Install removes all your installed software. But it keeps your settings. Well, I don't know if it keeps them all, but it seems to keep a lot of them. My settings include the fact that I have 2 monitors. I powered the TV off before I launched the repair. The repair showed stuff on the one monitor that was powered on. Then it seemed to finish. Curiously, I didn't get a login screen. It just went from total blankness to the desktop. But I didn't have a mouse. The Start button responded to the Windows key by slightly changing, but the Start Menu didn't open. I could Win+t around on the Task Bar. But I had only limited access to my system. I actually spent a few minutes contemplating a complete reinstall from scratch.

Then I had the inspiration of turning my TV on. Poof. My system was over there. The Repair Install appears to have the nasty habit of promoting my TV to primary display, which is NOT how I had things before launching the repair. So there's one setting that the repair does NOT preserve. For future reference, which I hope I don't need to refer to but I hope it helps somebody else, turn off your second monitor in Settings before you launch the repair install. Then for good measure, turn off your TV. That way, the repair will think you have only the one monitor & you won't go through the extremely depressing few minutes I did thinking I was facing a whole new install from scratch.

I now have a windows.old directory on my boot partition. I know this is something installs do. With all the trouble I had just getting this system to install (detailed elsewhere in this forum), this W11 started life with something like 5 windows.old directories. I'm surprised that after 3 repairs, there's only one windows.old. Whatever. I'm happy it's only one. I'm about to delete it. Is there any way to tell Windows not to bother with that?

So I am here to ask for some expert help. No doubt Brink will have some brilliant insight to offer here. You usually do. I'm guessing you're going to come up with one of your patented .reg files to fix my problem. Because if I can't make any file associations, this is going to be a nightmare system to work on.

TL: DR !

I've done a few repair installs recently and NEVER lost a single app.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot. Before I did Repair Install #1 I ran sfc /scannow. It found one corrupt file. If memory serves it was named bthmodem.dll. Something like that. It had modem in the middle of its name. That doesn't seem at all related to the Start Menu. After sfc found & fixed that, I rebooted & ran sfc again. It found no problems. After yet another reboot/sfc cycle which yielded no errors, my Start Menu was still non-functional.

In retrospect, I probably didn't need to do but the one Repair Install. If I had thought to look in Task Manager before Repair Install #2, I would have avoided it & #3. Oh well. Lessons learned.

@kelper, how recently? It is my understanding that 23H2 is rather new, less than 2 months old. Did you look at my images? TL : DR doesn't cut it with me. I took the trouble to post. The least you can do is read.

You did a Windows reset which, as it tells you and your screenshot shows, will remove your apps. I have done a repair install of 23H2 in the last two weeks. A reset is not the same as a repair install.

Please follow this tutorial


You said, " I really can't spend my entire life reading discussions in here." and then expect us to read your very long post (over 1,700 words!!)

If you had read post ~1 you would have saved yourself a lot of grief and time.

Good luck, I hope you get it sorted.

Windows.old contains previous install of Windows. You can look in those folders for any files you have lost (not apps).

Disk Clean-up can delete any you no longer need. You can't delete Windows.old by normal methods. After 28 days It will be deleted automatically.

I did read the tutorial. I just looked at it again. There is a screen that Brink posted where it says:

Fix problems using Windows Update

Look at the image I posted above. That option does not appear on that screen on my system. On my system, in that position on that screen of Settings -> System -> Recovery, it says:

Reset this PC

It does not say anything about using Windows Update on my PC. The top part of the image in Brink's tutorial shows 2 items at the top of the screen, the second one about using Windows Update. That entry is missing from my system. Look at my image above. It's missing.

Just for good measure, here's what I have on my Windows Update page:




It takes 2 images to show the whole page because it's scrollable. Those pending updates are, I believe, the same ones I installed the other day when I first successfully booted to my desktop with Internet connectivity. It seems what I did blasted those updates away, so Windows Update is offering them to me again. I have not yet installed them again but I will. They were installed at the time I first went to the Recovery page looking for the Repair with Update entry. It was not there. So this as yet not reapplied maintenance did not create the option that is in the tutorial but not on my system. It appears that both Brink's tutorial & your system offer an option that is missing from my system. This is a fresh install onto a new computer that I just finished building last week. That is to say, the machine was bare. I was not upgrading from a previous anything. This is the first operating system to ever exist on the computer & that has happened within just the last few days. It seems I am missing an option from my system. It would be nice if I got some advice on how to put that missing option on my system. It would be just as nice if I got some advice on how to restore the ability to associate applications with file types.

WildWilly said:

Now be warned. A Repair Install REMOVES YOUR INSTALLED APPLICATIONS. My W7 repair install didn't do that. And the tutorial above claims that it wouldn't do that. BUT IT DOES. Be warned. It TELLS YOU it's going to remove your installed applications. In my case, that even included my NVidia video/audio driver. It gives you a list of what it's going to nuke, which you would do well to write down on a piece of paper. But this process removes your applications. Here's what I get on my system.

View attachment 79952View attachment 79953View attachment 79954View attachment 79955

Click to expand...

Hello mate,

Your screenshots indicate you "Reset Windows 11" like in option 2 below instead of doing a repair install.

A reset will remove your apps even with "Keep my files" selected, but a repair install will not.

WildWilly said:

I did read the tutorial. I just looked at it again. There is a screen that Brink posted where it says:

Fix problems using Windows Update

Look at the image I posted above. That option does not appear on that screen on my system.....

Click to expand...

You obviously didn't read it all. Brink clearly states that the option to 'fix problems with Windows update' is only available (for now) in the latest Insider Canary builds.

This option is only available starting with Windows 11 build 25905 (Canary).

Well then I guess I'm not a canary, just a bird brain.

The issue still remains, however, why I can't manage to get the file association thing to work. It pops up & locks, necessitating a kill via Task Manager. This was working a few days ago. Now it's useless. How do I even diagnose this?

If you were to do a proper repair install using option 2, I think these other problems would go away.