HELP! Recover Windows 10 from C: Partition?

SpeedyVV

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Ok, brother-in-law accidentally put the wrong power cord!

td;dr Windows 10 PC no longer boots and the Windows system partitions are foobar.

The C: drive looks completely intact.

So is there a way to recreate the system from that C: drive? I have extra drives to copy stuff back and forth if required and extra PCs.

Tried all sorts of partition tools to recreate systems partitions but just cant get it to boot :-(
 
If there's data on it you want to recover, boot into Ubunutu from a USB drive, recover the files you want then re-install windows.

You might be able to repair the boot problem by booting the Windows installation media and trying the recovery options.
 
As Stanley said:

- Boot into ubuntu live media.
- Back up user profile to external drive.
- Reinstall Windows.
- Activate hidden Administrator account.
- Log into Administrator account.
- Transfer user profile back into your newly created profile.
- Reinstall all software.

Bear in mind that if the drive is in an unclean state you will need to remove it and plug it into another Windows machine to backup the user profile.
 
There is program called @ctive partition recovery, you can try that to recover your partitions. Then boot from Windows 10 installation media and fix boot sectors.
 
As Stanley said:

- Boot into ubuntu live media.
- Back up user profile to external drive.
- Reinstall Windows.
- Activate hidden Administrator account.
- Log into Administrator account.
- Transfer user profile back into your newly created profile.
- Reinstall all software.

Bear in mind that if the drive is in an unclean state you will need to remove it and plug it into another Windows machine to backup the user profile.

He's looking for a way to save the C: partition, not copy his user details. Just based on his post alone and having other PC's he can throw it in tells me he is already capable of that. He wants to take that booting windows partition and fix it, either in place or on another drive.
 
He's looking for a way to save the C: partition, not copy his user details. Just based on his post alone and having other PC's he can throw it in tells me he is already capable of that. He wants to take that booting windows partition and fix it, either in place or on another drive.

Which I also alluded to in my post. Boot from Windows install media and do a recovery from there. If it can fix the boot issue it will.
 
He's looking for a way to save the C: partition, not copy his user details. Just based on his post alone and having other PC's he can throw it in tells me he is already capable of that. He wants to take that booting windows partition and fix it, either in place or on another drive.

So fire up a live distro, start up Gparted and mark the boot partition as bootable. If that doesn't work there's nothing you can do but back up the user profile and reinstall, as Windows Recovery is about as useful as sfc /scannow in most situations.
 
Is it possible that fixboot / rebuildbcd / fixmbr recovery stuff could help in this type of instance? I haven't had too much luck lately with fubar'd W10 boot fixes though, on a number of machines that have gone south recently. Apparently MS has royally screwed up their own recovery commands
 
Is it possible that fixboot / rebuildbcd / fixmbr recovery stuff could help in this type of instance? I haven't had too much luck lately with fubar'd W10 boot fixes though, on a number of machines that have gone south recently. Apparently MS has royally screwed up their own recovery commands

I've tried this process many times with no success. You either get an error or the commands appear to work but actually do nothing at all.
 
I've tried this process many times with no success. You either get an error or the commands appear to work but actually do nothing at all.

I've had it work, but never on a UEFI partition. But I've repaired 2 or 3 MBR ones. It definitely is not a guarantee, though, that's for sure.
 
May I suggest that before the OP does anything he at least backs up the entire user profile...
 
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I've had it work, but never on a UEFI partition. But I've repaired 2 or 3 MBR ones. It definitely is not a guarantee, though, that's for sure.
Bootrec and automatic repair seem to do fuck all for EFI but we recently repaired two using bcdboot after assigning a letter to the EFI partition.
 
Bootrec and automatic repair seem to do fuck all for EFI but we recently repaired two using bcdboot after assigning a letter to the EFI partition.

Try my advice above using Gparted and making sure the partition is marked as bootable, I've encountered that issue also with EFI partitions..

I'm still not totally sold on UEFI.
 
Try my advice above using Gparted and making sure the partition is marked as bootable, I've encountered that issue also with EFI partitions..

I'm still not totally sold on UEFI.
Your suggestion appears to be wipe and replace because marking it as bootable isn't the full story. UEFI is necessary for faster boot times, secure boot, and the use of booting from NVME so its better to learn the ways and means ;)
 
Most likely the OPs problem is that he had no control over the drives during the installation (typical windows problem) and his true boot sector with hidden windows partitions resided on the drive that is now toast. The system will not become bootable by setting the "C:" partition bootable since it's not really the boot partition that the system expects. What the OP has to do is to plug a new SATA/M.2 drive back to the same port where the fried drive used to be and attempt a boot repair. Sometimes even that won't work and the only option is to reinstall at that point.

You should never have anything but your boot drive plugged in during windows install, otherwise you can and will end up with a cluster fuck of a setup like the OP seems to have. Windows will randomly just do what it chooses to do and the end user cannot control it.
 
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