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Stuck at "Preparing Automatic Repair" after successful restore (Fix! The BCD file was missing)

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Hello all,

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series 7559 with the following specs:

  • CPU: Intel i7-6700HQ
  • Ram: 16 gigs
  • OS drive: Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 500gb drive
  • Sata Drive: Seagate SSHD 1tb drive - This was the C drive from the factory. I added the M.2 drive when I bought the laptop.  This drive became D
  • Original OS: Windows 10 Home
  • IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller: Intell 100 Series.c230 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller

I had created a TI-2016 backup image of the whole system in 6/25.  Good thing since the 1T drive died on 8/7.  I restored the TI image just fine.  No errors or warnings.  However when I rebooted, Windows 10 anounces "Preparing automatic repair" and drops me into a "Choose an Option" screen.  No automatic option seems to cure this repeating boot-loop.  The first time I restored the system, I just restored the D drive.  When this boot-loop started, I restored the whole system and still nothing but "Preparing automatic Repair".

What can I do to get past this "preparing automatic repair" dead-end cycle?  Please Help!!

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Ok - I fixed it but made a series of discoveries along the way.  I'll try to record them here as best I can in case anyone else finds themselves in this particular rabit hole.  

First a little background.  As the specs in my original post states, the laptop originally came with a plain (and rather doggy) Seagate 1tb SATA drive.  When I bought the laptop new, I had opted to install the faster/smaller 500gb M.2 SSD drive.  I used Acronis TrueImage 2016 to clone the Seagate drive (now D) to the SSD drive (the new C).  In doing so, it duplicated the restore image and Windows Repair disk image too.  It's nice to have backups.  

7 months later the Seagate drive died.  I had made a full backup of both drives a month earlier (like I said, backups are nice to have). but upon performing a successful restore, I found myself unknowingly booting into Dell's preconfigured Windows Repair Disk partition.  Having never had the need to use a Windows 10 Repair Disk, I didn't recognize it for what it was.  Since I had two days of support left for my Acronis 2016 - timing is everything, isn't it? - I fired up a chat with Acronis Support.  Explaining all of this, minus the built-in Windows Repair Disk partition since I didn't know what it was by name, the support fellow said "Create a Windows Repair Disk, do a repair and have a nice day!"  Dell tech support had an equal level of insight.  So much for tech support.

So since I couldn't make the laptop more dead than it already was, I peformed a full restore (I had poked and prodded a bit with both Tech Supports) to reestablish a baseline and started a more in-depth dive.  After fiddling with the F12 boot options, I told the Dell to boot from a 2nd Win partition that it recognized since the first was continuously dropping me back into Repair Disk limbo.  This boot immediately gave up an error: 

The Boot Configureation for your PC is missing or contains errors.
File: \EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BCD
Error code: 0xc000000f

So after Googling that a bit, I came across this awesome post that got me 90% of the way there:
 http://superuser.com/questions/460762/how-can-i-repair-the-windows-8-efi-bootloader

Even though the post refers to Windows 8, the command sequence is identical. Where my story departed from the Awesme Post was the step "ren[ame] BCD BCD.bak".  On my system, the response was "file not found".  There was no file named "BCD".  Remember the error message above?  "The boot configuration for your PC IS MISSING or contains errors."  The smoking gun!  Or rather the smoking gun was not found, to be more accurate.  What *was* found were 2 files called "BCD.Backup.0001" and "BCD.Backup.0002".  I'm not sure what process created them, but I was damn happy they were there.  I copied the first backup to a file called just "BCD" - no extention at all - and rebooted and prayed.  That was the issue!  The system booted right into Windows 10 and greeted me with my customary login.  

And they lived happily ever after.  

PS: Follow the link to the SuperUser post I referenced and read the whole thing from top to bottom.  There are many other posts for that entry and one of them may have the answser if the tagged answer doesn't work for you.

Jim, thank you for posting your solution and insights for this problem to the forum - I am sure that some other users will find this information useful in a time of need!  Glad to hear that you have a working system again.