Help repairing an unbootable Windows 10 system - wdboot.sys missing

[Ian]

I know, GIYF, but it's not been much help with this. Hoping someone here can
give a more intelligent answer.

Long story short, built a Windows PC for a neighbour a couple of years ago,
nice Windows 7 home 64-bit system, now updated to Windows 10 and $diety knows
what else has been done to it, but it won't boot, complaining that wdboot.sys
is missing. Auto repair doesn't, and I'd like to avoid a reinstall (backups?
Recovery disc? pardon...)

Cleaned it up physically (it was filthy!), and given it 24 hours of memtest86,
so confident the hardware still works. Installed Windows 10 on a spare SSD,
chkdsk'd and virus scanned the original drive (nothing too ugly found,
surprisingly), and now I'd like to repair the broken Windows system, if at
all possible.

I would assume there is some way to replace wdboot.sys, and anything else
that's gone astray, from the clean Windows install on the SSD? I've found
reference to tools like BCDEDIT, BOORTEC, DISM, SFC, but no clear instructions
of how to use them in this situation.

If anyone can suggest how (if...) this can be done, or point to a useful guide
that isn't trying to sell some repair toolkit, I would be most grateful.

Failing that, guess it'll be poke about with them myself, or just reinstall.

Thanks for reading...

--
Ian

"Tamahome!!!" - "Miaka!!!"

[Vir Campestris]

On 13/12/2018 20:28, Ian wrote:
> Long story short, built a Windows PC for a neighbour a couple of years ago,
> nice Windows 7 home 64-bit system, now updated to Windows 10 and $diety knows
> what else has been done to it, but it won't boot, complaining that wdboot.sys
> is missing. Auto repair doesn't, and I'd like to avoid a reinstall (backups?
> Recovery disc? pardon...)

wd-what? I thought. Never heard of it. I'm 5 years out of Windows, so I
googled.

And found this:

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/200301-sneaky-rootkit-help-needed/

Oh *****.

Then a bit more found this:

http://servicedefaults.com/10/wdboot/

So perhaps it's normal after all...

This box runs Win7, and I don't have a Win10 at home.

Andy

[GB]

I have a copy of the file in windows\system32\drivers on my machine.

[Ian]

Thanks both. I suppose it's possible that file got infected and then nuked
by some AV. Will try putting it back from the clean install and see if that
helps...

[Ian]

Well that was fun. Loaded off the clean Win10 install, it wouldn't let me
copy anything into windows\system32\drivers on the original system disc,
wtf microsoft!

Booted into SystemRescueCD (http://www.system-rescue-cd.org - no affiliation,
just the first hit for linux live cd with ntfs support), mounted up the
two windows partitions and copied over windows/system32/drivers/wd/* from
the new to the original, rebooted off the old disc and it actually made it
to the desktop!

Now installing the latest Win10 updates, then in for a good reaming out
of all the crapware.