How should I go about repairing startup repair?
Installing startup repair onto the hard drive, as if it was not originally there, would also fix this.
In the hope that someone at a Windows-specific forum may have an idea, I've also posted this over at Microsoft Answers: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/install-system-repairfix-system-repair-boot-entry/6424eada-40b7-440e-9759-e2cc67aa3e3a
Startup repair is actually a tool running under the system recovery environment. The system recovery environment is what needs to be fixed, but I'll call it startup repair because that's what it's called in the boot menu.
Summary at bottom.
Problem
When attempting to use Startup Repair, I get a screen with the status code 0xc000000e
and the error message:
The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.
If I rebuild the BCD (I have a backup of the semi-broken one), I no longer have a Startup Repair option.
History
I accidentally started my computer (two hard drives in RAID 1) in IDE mode. This caused Windows to crash on startup, obviously. The BCD store was corrupted, giving the same startup message as above, but for normal boot. In an attempt to fix this, I booted off the installation disc, getting a whole lot of errors when trying to use bootrec /rebuildbcd
command:
The requested system device cannot be found
More specifically, there were no entries on the screen to choose an OS. I eventually got around this by manually opening the BCD store (bcdedit /store C:\Boot\BCD
) and correcting the device
entries on {bootmgr}
and {default}
and the osdevice
on {default}
, to partition=C:
for {bootmgr}
(System Reserved) and partition=D:
for {default}
. They were listed as unknown
, probably due to the failed boot attempt on IDE mode.
Now, at least, I can successfully boot... partway... into Windows. The main purpose of this question is to ask how I can restore the Startup Repair
boot option, which throws an error trying to find the boot device: the same one the main boot was throwing. There is no entry in the BCD store. On my first restart into the DVD recovery environment after manual recovery, it offered to recover the on-disk recovery environment, which was reported as successful (and obviously was not).
Problems with normal boot (now fixed)
Now, the other major problem is booting partway. Specifically, chkdsk
starts every boot. After running and completing the first time, it rebooted and repeated. The drive itself is still readable, as evidenced by the partial boot and my ability to read it through the DVD based recovery environment. Safe Mode freezes on loading CLASSPNP.sys
and the keyboard is unresponsive during the chkdsk
countdown, which points to possible file/driver corruption. Is there anything I can/should do?
sfc
running in offline mode reported
Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations
My main question remains on how I can get startup repair working again. I'm hopeful that once that works I can run a system restore which may (or may not) restore possibly corrupted system binaries.
Eventually the DVD version of startup repair fixed whatever the problem was with the normal Windows boot. Unfortunately, something has changed a drive GUID or something somewhere, which means System Restore has no restore points for my current C:
and D:
partitions, but it does have quite a few for a C: (Missing)
and D: (Missing)
. For a recovery tool to break when drive GUIDs change is... well, utterly useless. I wonder who designed this.
The installed version of Startup Repair remains broken.
I'm quite skilled at creating walls of text. Here's the summary:
- BCD was corrupted
- BCD was manually repaired by fixing the
device
andosdevice
entries - Startup repair now reports it cannot find the startup device, the same error normal boot gave when the BCD was corrupted
Normal startup runschkdsk
every boot and reboots as soon as its doneSafe mode hangs atCLASSPNP.sys
Keyboard is unresponsive during thechkdsk
press any key countdown
If it makes any difference, my specific OS is Windows 7 x64 Professional.
And of course, the majority of online resources deal with one of the following:
- Use of startup repair to repair failure to boot
- Fixing failure to boot
- Disabling startup repair