(tl;dr; sorry about the long post, text in bold has main details)
I have a Windows 10 and KDE Neon dual boot laptop. I rarely boot my Windows partition but I do use it regularly through a virtualized configuration with VMware in Neon. This has worked great for the most part...
... until last night ... I've had some issues with Linux/XOrg/KDE5/(...) going all nutty when docking/undocking and I've made it a habit to Suspend my VM just in case (usually), but last night I forgot and sure enough, my computer completely froze and needed to be powered off manually.
I powered it off, then booted back into Linux with no problem, but now Windows won't boot from the VM or from UEFI as a physical dual boot partition. Using the docking station locked up the computer and hosed my Windows partition (since it was booted in the virtual env).
The actual boot sectors and partition seem ok (after chkdsk'ing it and it did some repairs). When it starts up it will get a BSOD saying "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED". It reboots in a mini-recovery shell that says: "A required device isn't connected or cant be accessed - error code: 0x0000225" and has 3 options: "press enter to try again, f8 for startup settings, or esc for UEFI firmware setup". F8 presents the old-school safe-mode, boot logging, vga mode, etc options and I've tried all of those with the same results (the original BSOD).
Things I've tried:
dism /image:c:\ /cleanup-image /restorehealth /limitaccess /source:wim:d:\sources\install.wim:1
(and minor variations of this)
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=C:\windows
Things that seemed promising:
So with all that, my questions are:
Thank you!
Ok so I have an answer for #3 and #4 and well... crazy stuff...
After reading Tatakai's comment I decided to go back and re-check gparted. The recovery partition for Windows had a yellow exclamation (well one of them, for some reason I have 3: sda1, sda5, and sda10 - sda5 was errored). After reading and trying various things I eventually just declared f*** it and decided to reformat that partition with NTFS, reapply the 2 flags (hidden and something else, can't remember) and then copy all files from sda10 to the freshly created sda5.
It didn't quite work yet, but it was progress I think. I needed to reinit my computer's booty goodness with this guide (note, started about halfway down the document at "Fix UEFI Boot in Windows 8, 8.1 or 10" - the order seems important - first time I did it kinda haphazardly and it didn't work, second time I followed it to the T and it worked great).
Ok so at this point I now have the locally installed recovery environment back available. Once I boot into that, it's got some subtle differences, such as the tools ask for an admin accounts password before accessing them and the Refresh/Restore feature is now there!
Of course that feature followed suit and decided that tonight wasn't going to be my night to get off easily. So it immediately failed every time (as did everything else, still).
I did several additional cleanups and stuff, but never quite got into Windows... I decided for my coup de grace I was going to run rsync -a /mnt/win/WINDOWS.OLD/* /mnt/win/
and just copy all of the old files over on top of the new ones and see if it boots.
Here's where it gets a little crazy ... IT WORKED! (kinda... for a while...). I was shocked, everything booted up and seemed to work quite well. A couple things were having some issues, like changing the Date/Time. I thought it would be good to run sfc /scannow
now, so I did. It was actually running instead of failing immediately and about 60% in, it failed. And suddenly every file was disappearing. I mean the C:\WINDOWS folder became a ghost town of old empty folders, but hardly a single file (and yet I was still booted in it, but nothing was working). My Users folders was slowly disappearing. I could see each icon disappear off my desktop, and over the course of about 20 mins just about everything went away. I was still booted into Windows, I had the explorer.exe and cmd.exe processes locked so the executables were still in C:\WINDOWS, but nothing else was.
I believe it all got copied over to C:\WINDOWS.OLD. I don't know if sfc /scannow triggered some scheduled task or job and was confused by the build number so it thought it needed to clean itself up... no clue. I need to go through WINDOWS.OLD a little closer and make sure it has all my stuff in it. I'm kinda wishing I took "newcoder's" protip (his comment above) before going on this crazy mission.
Anyway, at this point the OS is dead for good. I'm just hoping all my files are still alive and well in WINDOWS.OLD. Thanks everyone for the assistance!
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