How To Repair Windows To Go
Hien Mondesir
Sometimes a 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 typically found 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 restore the prior state of 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 information that might otherwise go missing. Ignore this advice 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.
The /restorehealth command can be tricky to use. Because it can actually repair 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.
A safer bet is to point DISM at a known good source for Windows image components on the local machine (or on your local network). This can be a Windows image (.wim) file or a compressed Windows image (.esd, which is used for electronic software downloads of Windows installations, as the file extension is meant to communicate). You can also point to a separate copy of a WinSXS folder (the usual directory path is C:WindowsWinSXS) taken from another PC with similar or identical hardware for which dism ... /checkhealth returns a clean bill of health.
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 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):
As with DISM, you must run SFC from an Administrator: Command Prompt or an Administrative PowerShell or Windows Terminal session. This command takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete, depending on your PC hardware. Unlike DISM, SFC scans and initiates repairs within a single command.
It usually takes between 5 and 15 minutes to revert to a restore point. The amount of additional effort to catch back up to where you left off depends on the number of items that need to be installed or updated, as shown in Figure 7. This can take from minutes to an hour or more depending on size and scope.
This technique essentially involves overwriting the current OS installation with a fresh new copy while leaving your data files, settings, and preferences alone. It means running the Windows 10 installer for the same version/build that is currently running on the machine from inside Windows 10 itself.
Before launching into this process, make 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 install is complete.
Reset this PC is convenient and requires no supplementary media, but I prefer the traditional approach of performing a clean Windows 10 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 10 start over with a clean slate.
Be sure to check out the great Ninite utility, which lets you create a custom menu of common applications and tools that it will then automatically install on your behalf. Ninite covers about half of what I normally outfit my production PCs with, so I still have to download another dozen programs or so to finish up after that. The Ninite selection screen appears in Figure 10.
Ed Tittel has been working in and around IT for over 30 years and has been a Windows Insider MVP since 2018. The author of more than 100 computing books, Ed is perhaps best known for his Exam Cram series of certification prep books. These days, Ed blogs weekly for GoCertify.com and more often than that at Win10.Guru. To learn more about Ed, visit his website at edtittel.com.
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?
Repair Windows Security using DISM: Open Command Prompt as administrator and run the following commands: DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /StartComponentCleanup
@ShahbazUbaid my windows license is already expired. and i am not getting any security updates ever since. and that is also the time where i noticed that my windows security app won't open. is it because of my windows license bein expired? do you think if i reactivate my license, it will solve my problem?
@TayDean It's early 2024 and I am in the same boat since the most recent update. In all their wisdom, Microsoft has removed Troubleshooter with this update and wants me to contact tech support. The last time I did that, I was 77 people away from help. I do not have that kind of time.
I've tried all the suggestions here except reinstalling Windows, which is a major hassle and would require hunting down the software I use for work and reinstalling it too. I had to do this once last week because a previous update crashed my computer. It created all manner of work-related issues.
This is really dumb and Microsoft should have fixed this already. But I'm open to more suggestions.
@ShahbazUbaid I appreciate the suggestion, but it didn't work. I'd actually tried it already along with a host of other suggestions found in other places, but thought I'd missed something. I did not.
I'm fairly sure I'm going to have to reinstall Windows again to fix this. It will have to wait until the weekend as I work full-time from home and this has eaten up far too much of my time as it is.
Exceedingly frustrating.
Client with Server 2019 Standard. Had a drive fail in RAID 5 array (which shouldn't have caused corruption, but it did). I had to rollback/restore registry hive including COMPONENTS from prior to any corruption. This rolled it back to Dec. 15 2022 timeframe, whereas drive and corruption occurred between this date and Jan. 1 2023. Server works fine, minus seeing that I can't run Windows update, it fails it can't connect to update service, as though not connected for internet (server has full internet access, shows that status AOK, however also has strange issue showing "Not connected" to any networks in the Network & Internet overview.
Started with SFC /scannow and DISM online with basic start of repairhealth and both for most part fail or had failed. I've gotten to the point of where I have been trying to run DISM using an ISO, mounted ISO drive path, and also a restored local copy of the C:\Windows folder from backup, to point to as a source. But consistently fails indicating it can't see/find the source. (even though am explicitly pointing it to valid sources). Consistently appear to be getting 800F081F as error.
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