I can't for the life of me; figure out why this function is called Startup Repair or Repair my computer. It always tells me that it cannot repair Windows. Now I have to go into Windows and repair it manually with commands that are in the Windows manual. So I can't figure out why the Startup Repair option cannot run these commands to fix the problem or at least give me a reason it can't repair my OS installation. It gives me messages like "A required device isn't connected or can't be found", umm... Would you mind telling me what device you were looking for??? Now this message seemingly had nothing to do with my issue. What I had to do was the following to get my computer back running:
- Boot from the USB Drive that I had previously created. You are totally screwed if you haven't created one and only good if your computer can boot from a USB drive.
- Go to Advanced Options in order to run a Command Prompt
- Change to the system drive. Use the DIR command to find the contents of each drive so you can tell which it is
- Run Checkdsk /f
- Run sfc /scannow
- Restart Computer. If it does not start correctly, boot from the USB drive again and find your way to the command prompt again.
- Run bootrec /rebuildmbr
- Run bootrec /fixmbr
- Run bootrec /fixboot
- Restart Computer
Hopefully this will get your computer started. I don't know why Startup Repair could not automatically do this for me...
Now the other options that were on the USB boot drive were useless. I originally upgraded my Windows 7 installation to Windows 10 and the only thing that the USB boot drive recognized was a Windows 7 installation and could not do anything with it. So, even though the upgrade installation worked just wonderfully; it seems that any attempt to automatically fix the upgrade when it failed was impossible. I originally tried a System Restore and it stated that I had Windows 7 installed and would not process that request. I then tried to reinstall Windows and it stated that my drive was locked. So, this proved that my USB drive was useless except for the command prompt of which I could fix the installation manually myself... What gives?
It is possible that on a clean installation of Windows 10 or an Windows 7 upgraded installation on a drive where there were no OEM partitions the USB drive does work for the most part, but on an upgrade of a computer OEM partitions with a Windows 7 installation upgraded to Windows 10 it definitely did not work.