The fact that almost all known modifications of Windows in a certain sense are extremely unstable in operation is known to everyone and everyone. The worst option is the inability to start the system when a window with the System Recovery Options appears on the screen, and the boot process at this point hangs tightly, prompting the user to take some decision on his own to restore the OS. Let’s try to figure out how to restore Windows to working using such system tools.
System Recovery Options: what to do when a window appears with a system boot error?
The very first and right decision will be to use an additional dialog of the same name, which appears after the main window with the OS recovery options, when one of the menu items is activated. But do not rush! It is possible that the failure was short-term and so far no drastic measures can be resorted to.
To get started, try simply forcing a computer restart. If the situation is not fixed, and the System Recovery Options Windows window displays again, restart the terminal or laptop again, and then immediately after the start screen disappears, press the F8 key and call up the additional menu.
In it, it is best to use either downloading the last successful configuration, or try to start in safe mode, and then use the rollback tools already in the loaded system, which are located in the Control Panel. This solution applies only to systems of the seventh version and below.
In the case of the “eight” and “ten”, in which the call to this menu by pressing F8 is disabled, you will have to boot from a removable drive with the distribution. If the system starts in Safe Mode, you can use additional boot options or restart with the Shift key held down.
System Recovery Options on Windows 7: Startup Recovery Methods
But we can assume that the automatic recovery did not work, or a safe start also failed.
In the boot menu options, go to the troubleshooting item, and then select boot recovery from the System Recovery Options window. If the system components or the partition of the hard drive where the storage space for recovery points and healthy images is reserved is not damaged, this may work.
If this does not help, instead of starting the recovery from the System Recovery Options menu, select system recovery, then manually expand the list with all available rollback points and confirm the use of one of them.
Almost similar actions can be performed when selecting a restore item from a backup. If it was created automatically, or at some point you created it yourself, this can give the desired result.
Note: if during the stationary boot the above actions do not give the result, use the boot drive with the distribution kit or the LiveCD environment, select the restore point at startup, and then use one of the proposed methods. By the way, starting from bootable media is the best option for any action in such a situation.
Command line toolkit
Now suppose the worst - none of the proposed methods allowed to restore the system. In such a situation, the most appropriate solution would be to use the command console toolkit, which can be launched from the System Recovery Options main menu. If the problem is damage to the bootloader, you can restore it by using the special tool Bootrec.exe. Enter this command in the console, and then type / fixmbr after a space . After that, enter the main command again, and after it also add / fixboot after a space .
In theory, after the execution of these two commands, the system will come to its senses. If this doesn’t help, call the command console again and completely rewrite the bootloader by entering the / rebuildbcd attribute after the main command (the right slash is required to enter all three commands). After performing a restart in a running OS, or even if it does not boot again, check and restore system components using the sfc / scannow command .
Windows 10 Features
The tenth modification turned out to be extremely successful in the sense that it is not necessary to restore it by the methods described above.
If the damage has reached a critical threshold, but the OS itself can boot using a safe start, it is easiest to perform a full reset to the initial state using the appropriate tool in the recovery section of the options menu.
But to ensure that neither the installed programs, nor your user files are destroyed during the rollback process, in the working system, connect the distribution media or mount the image in a virtual drive (double-click on the file), and then run the installer manually (Setup file .exe in the root of the disk), after which, at the stage of choosing the installation option, check the option to save the required data.