Repair Windows 98

[Janie Leverone]

Sometimesa Windows 10 system starts misbehaving to the point where repair is needed. This often takes the form of worsening performance or stability, and can originate from damage to, loss of, or corruption of Windows system files (normally in the C:\Windows folder hierarchy). When that happens, users would be well advised to break out the following routine to help them set things back to rights.

The amount of time and effort required for each step goes up incrementally. Some steps involve additional work to get your PC more or less back to where it was prior to taking that step. Thus, the most important bit of advice I can dispense for those who must venture beyond Step 1 is this: make a complete backup of your system to provide a source for files and settings that might otherwise go missing. Ignore this at your own risk.

Even if errors were detected in the preceding step, this command should complete successfully. It replaces corrupt or questionable elements in the Windows Side-by-Side (WinSxS) store, reading from a local copy of your Windows image files by default.

The /restorehealth command can be tricky to use. Because it actually repairs a Windows image, it needs a source from which to attempt such repairs. You can omit the /source option, but if you do, the command will try to grab its files from Windows Update over the internet. This may or may not work, depending on firewall settings on your network.

The syntax for image files is where things can get interesting. To point to the install.wim file that shows up in ISO downloads for the Windows 10 or 11 installer on a USB flash drive designated L:, for example, you must use the following source specification (which uses the first image it finds inside the .wim file, designated :1):

Figure 3 shows sample output when SFC finds files in need of repair. If this occurs on your PC, repeat the SFC /scannow command until you see the clean bill of health shown in Figure 4. This seldom takes more than two or three tries (on the system shown in Figures 3 and 4, it took one repeat only).

For Windows 10 or 11, this technique essentially involves overwriting the current OS installation with a fresh new copy while leaving data files, settings, and preferences alone. That means running the Windows 10 or 11 installer for the same version/build currently running on the machine from inside Windows itself. As you will learn at the end of this section, this is markedly easier for Windows 11 than it is for Windows 10.

Before launching into this process, be sure to log in to Windows 10 with an administrative account. Most experts recommend that you disable or uninstall any third-party antivirus or security software (anything other than Windows Defender, in other words) and turn off Fast Boot and Secure Boot in your UEFI firmware settings (if turned on). You can reinstate these items when the in-place upgrade is complete.

Reset this PC is convenient and requires no supplementary media, but I prefer a more traditional approach: performing a clean Windows installation from a bootable USB drive or mounted ISO, covered next.

This option means starting over with a completely new OS installation. Why might this be necessary? Aside from reasons such as incurable system instability, malware infestation, or problems that take longer to fix than the time is worth, it may be desirable to switch from legacy BIOS emulation to using available UEFI. It might also be desirable to wipe the boot/system drive clean to remove leftover items (recovery partitions, OEM partitions, and so forth) from older Windows versions and let Windows start over with a clean slate.

I currently have the Windows 8 installer on a flash drive and tried using the Automatic Repair option to repair the bootloader but it didn't do anything. The Startup Repair option is also missing in the Windows 8 installer.

Firstly, boot from a UEFI Windows 8 recovery disk (CD/DVD/USB) - I found that the automated recovery process didn't find the correct Windows partition, nor when I managed to add it to BCD settings would it make it reliably bootable e.g. using BCDEDIT I got it to find and launch the Windows partition but it refused to cold boot or would not "keep" the settings after a 2nd reboot or power off.

I had a 1.5 TB hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it. I then installed Windows 8 onto a 150 GB SSD I bought. The 1.5 TB hard drive failed and I could hear it making a noise, my computer would no longer start, saying "please insert system disk". I thought that the bootloader was missing as it must have been on the 1.5 TB disk. It turns out it was but the problem then was the guides I followed would not rebuild the bootloader or whatever it is called as i did not have an EFI partition on the smaller 150 GB disk (this may have existed on the failed disk), it only had 1 partition which filled the entire disk.

I did not want to lose all my data so I entered the Command Prompt by booting from my Windows 8 install USB drive (noting that you cannot boot the UEFI version of this if that appears, select to boot from the just the USB drive without the UEFI appearing before it).

These commands will create the EFI partition. Double-check everything by typing list vol. You should see a 200 MB partition. You now need to assign it a letter. Do this by typing assign,then list vol again to see what letter has been assigned.

Here's what you've probably done by now. IF ANY OF THIS DOES NOT MATCH, CAREFULLY EVALUATE WHETHER THIS IS IN FACT YOUR PROBLEM, and READ this for ideas but don't FOLLOW it without thinking first.

A: Well, that really shouldn't happen. It likely means you're either in the wrong directory, support EFI but weren't actually using it, or somehow rebuilt your entire EFI partition without all of the required Windows materials (possible, especially when using multiple versions of Windows). In that case, you'll need to copy the EFI materials from the DVD, then either modify or rebuild the Boot Configuration Database using BCDedit.

Anyway, hope this helps solve some problems for people, or at least gets them thinking. As a very important final point, please note that you can mount and inspect your EFI partition under Windows normally using the DiskPart: Assign technique above. You should do this at least once, to get a complete backup of your EFI partition, BEFORE you run into this kind of trouble. I recommend one backup into a subdirectory on your C: drive, and one on a USB flash drive.

Sorry that's so long-winded. I need to turn this into a proper article at some point, but there are so many people who are SO frustrated that I felt the need to document my experience as completely and rapidly as I could.

Windows 8 is still not out in final form, so problems are to be expected.You are in an area new to most of us, where the commands we used to use may not work anymore.To the commands listed by @soandos, I add this one that completely rebuilds the BCD :

If nothing works, the article Repairing Windows 7 when they fail to boot has some advice on using bcdedit to correct boot errors. It would in any case be interestingto see what is the output of bcdedit on your computer.

Today, after a usual restart, I got the message MBR not found or similar to that, I dont remember any more. I tried bootrec commands, Windows automatic repair (it couldnt find any installed Windows), a million other ways and nothing.

The problem was when I executed bootrec /rebuildbcd it went normaly, and then when I had to enter yes if I want to save the configuration, I got the message, the file is not accessible because it is used by a another process.

Hi, my prusaslicer auto-repair tool doesnt work. I have the 2.7.1 version installed. But it didnt worked with ver. 2.6.0 either. The progess bar go to 50% then it just hung there and never finish the repair.

The repair tool works just fine with my PS 2.7.1. Have you tried it with a simple object? If you have some very challenging mesh, or a very complex mesh with millions of faces the auto-repair tool can take a very long time and during that time it will look as if it permanently froze. But it isn't. I have had some auto-repairs which took a whole night to complete and while doing so looked frozen until it is done.

It can help a lot if you use the "simplify model" tool before, just reduce the mesh to whatever the "Detail level high" setting suggests and check if you lost any significant details. If you lost something you can use a milder reduction by using the reduction by percent option. If the simplified model looks fine, proceed with the auto-repair tool. It should be a lot faster then.

It happen with every broken object i try to repair. And in the window repair, the progress bar goes only 50% and freeze there. And the text inside that window say "Item repaired by windows repair algorithms"

Indeed. PS is quite good at getting printable g-code out of almost any mesh, no matter how broken the meshes are you throw at it. However, not always. Sometimes there are issues with missing layers or even entire volumes.

I have tried everything I can think of, I've had two friends who deal with IT problems look at my computer via shared screen with no luck. Since updating to Windows 11 I never noticed Windows Security would not open until recently, it's active and running in the background in Task Manager. I've tried the Powershell and CMD hotfixes, I've reset my PC locally and cloud but I have no restore or recovery points prior to the Windows 11 update. My PC is up to date on all firmware from Microsoft but Windows Security still will not open. Windows Security nor Windows Defender is not listed under my "Installed Apps" or "Default Apps" so I can't try a drop down repair on it. It does show within my Task Manager that there is Windows Defender engine running and in the hidden icons tab it shows Windows Security active. How do you fix this without having to lug your whole PC to a shop?

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