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Recovery from Windows 10

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I know there is someone in this forum that knows the answer to my problems so please help.   For the last month I have been trying to recover from Windows 10 problems and therefore have tried everything.  Yesterday I talked on the phone with Microsoft support and they tried to guide me through a clean install of the latest update to Windows 10.  It did not work and all I ended up with is the primary C drive bland and no partitions.  They gave up saying it must be a disk problem.

I went back to Acronis and found my original backups of the 3 partition on the Primary drive.  I restored the 1st partition using Recovery (Acronis 11) but it would still not boot.   I noticed that when I selected the C drive is did NOT select the MBR box.   So now I have proceeded to Recover the 2nd and 3rd partitions so the primary drive will soon be back to normal.   I have a suspicion that it will not boot to Windows 10.  My question is,...Should I use Command Prompt to run "Bootrec.exe /fixmbr" or should I try Acronis Startup Recovery Manager?

Please don't assume I know anything about the structure of PC.  I know a few things but not enough to keep me out of trouble.

 

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I finished the full recover of the 3rd and last partition to the Primary drive.  However it will still not boot.  I then tried Windows 10 System Repair disk and it "Checked for errors", then did a disk scan for errors, then it started "Attempting Repairs".   This ran for at least 10 minutes and then gave me 3 options, Command prompt, shut down, or XXXXX.   I went to command prompt and did a DIR to look at "C" and all looked fine.     I did a restart and again the system would not boot.   I started Windows Repair disk again and got to the Command prompt.   I did a Bootrec /fixmbr.   It said it did this OK.   Then I did a "Bootrec /fixboot" and the response was,...Can not open Boot.ini

I started the Acronis System Recovery software and ativated that software and it said it installed and ran.   I tried to boot but it did not evenget past the BIOS screen and hung.   Any ideas of what I should do?????

Hello Buddy,

It's strange that you're getting boot.ini errors considering that boot.ini is only used by Windows XP and earlier.

For Windows 10, you will usually have a seperate "System Reserved" hidden partition of about a couple hundred MB that contains all of the boot stuff. So your system is going to be on the C:\ volume, but all the data used by Windows Boot Manager to boot this system is going to be on the hidden "System Resereved" partition.

Since the boot process starts on this hidden "System Reserved" partition, it is the one that has to have "primary, active" attributes.

So my advice to you is:

- Check if this partition is available inside your backup;

- Make sure to restore it along with your C: volume

- Make sure it is set to "active" before restore (an active partition on a disk is the one where the boot starts from)

If the "System Reserved" partition is not part of your backup, then you can try to rebuild the "Boot Configuration Data" (BCD). For example, as described here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2004518