This one begins with a support request that a system is non responsive. The usual suggestion of a hard shutdown and reboot is suggested.

They responded that it was erroring with something else, then stated it would go into “attempting repair” and restart and this cycle would continue.

Once I got a hold of the laptop, I attempted a boot repair using the recovery apps from the Windows 10 boot options. After that failed I resorted to my old blog post: blog post with a similar problem from years ago, showed the same symptoms :

bootrec /FixMBR (didn’t work)

bootrec /FixBoot (access denied)

bootrec /ScanOS (Found 0 installed instances)

bootrec /RebuildBCD (Found 0 installed instances)

Quickly Googling the access denied on fixing brought me to this answers page on MS, where billy reminded be about assigning the boot partition a drive letter. As well as a newer command to run which worked!

1) Diskpart

2) List Vol

3) Select Vol (3 or 4, which ever is ~100MB)

4) Assign letter V

5) bcdboot C:\windows /s V: /f UEFI

.

I was pretty shocked to see Windows boot, and glad one system I didn’t have to re-image and manually save files. 😀