This computer has been largely unused for the past 9 months except for a few times when it was used for printing. Windows was updated at least once upon shutting down the computer. I was able to boot to the desktop with no problems yesterday. I began updating programs and after updating Avast, was prompted to restart. After restarting, it will no longer boot to the desktop. I am not even able to boot into safe mode.
I ran Startup Repair from System Recovery. It was unsuccessful and gives an error message of StartupRepairOffline. I read that I could take a boot disk and run Startup Repair from there. I tried that but got the exact same error message.
I tried System Restore. There is only one restore point (even after checking "Show more restore points") from just before the Avast update. I tried restoring to that, and Windows says it was successful, but I am still unable to boot to the desktop and get stuck in the same loop of only being able to restart into System Recovery mode.
I tried running sfc /scannow from the command prompt within System Recovery but it says that there is a "pending system restore" requiring a reboot to complete. Rebooting doesn't seem to affect anything though. I read about deleting pending.xml from my install directory as well as the x: directory. I made copies of these files to a USB drive then deleted them from the directories on my PC. Then I rebooted and tried sfc /scannow again but still got the same error.
Lastly, I tried performing an upgrade/reinstall from my boot disc, but it says I cannot do though from booting into the disc. It says I have to boot to Windows then upgrade from there. Only I am not able to get to that stage in order to perform the reinstall.
Does anybody have any thoughts on what else I should try?
Edit:
I believe rebuilding the bcd from scratch solved my problem:
bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd
I ran Startup Repair from System Recovery. It was unsuccessful and gives an error message of StartupRepairOffline. I read that I could take a boot disk and run Startup Repair from there. I tried that but got the exact same error message.
I tried System Restore. There is only one restore point (even after checking "Show more restore points") from just before the Avast update. I tried restoring to that, and Windows says it was successful, but I am still unable to boot to the desktop and get stuck in the same loop of only being able to restart into System Recovery mode.
I tried running sfc /scannow from the command prompt within System Recovery but it says that there is a "pending system restore" requiring a reboot to complete. Rebooting doesn't seem to affect anything though. I read about deleting pending.xml from my install directory as well as the x: directory. I made copies of these files to a USB drive then deleted them from the directories on my PC. Then I rebooted and tried sfc /scannow again but still got the same error.
Lastly, I tried performing an upgrade/reinstall from my boot disc, but it says I cannot do though from booting into the disc. It says I have to boot to Windows then upgrade from there. Only I am not able to get to that stage in order to perform the reinstall.
Does anybody have any thoughts on what else I should try?
Edit:
I believe rebuilding the bcd from scratch solved my problem:
bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd
Last edited: