Multiple problems trying to troubleshoot windows 8.1 startup

[winbust]

Hi,

I have a windows 8.1 machine doing an infinite automatic repair loop. I am able to get into the recovery environment and the disk seems fine. Have been able to back the entire disk up externally both via robocopy and disk image and am now trying to troubleshoot the root cause of the infinite startup loop.

When I disable automatic recovery using bcdedit, I get a message on boot saying '0xc000000f Windows failed to load because the NLS data is missing, or corrupt.'

I then decided to try to use a system restore. The latest system restore checkpoint causes crashes the system restore utility. The other checkpoints return system restore errors with 0x80070571.

All signs point to a disk corruption of some sort, but chkdsk /f runs fine with no errors as mentioned the full disk was able to be backed up with no problems.

I then attempted to restore any corrupted files with sfc /scannow hoping to get around the nls files missing issue. sfc /scannow from the windows recovery environment using offbootdir and offwindir errors with 'resource protection could not complete requested operation'. Nothing I am able to do seems to cause sfc to run successfully.

There are no logs within CBS at all that describe what is erroring, either within the root windows partition or the recovery partition.

I am trying to avoid reformat if possible but I can't seem to come up with any other ideas to try.

[edit] Also tried running sfcfix but receive a subsystem not present error from the 8.1 recovery environment

Thanks!

 

[winbust]

[edit 2] I can run sfcfix from another win pe 5.0 environment, but I guess I'll need to know if it is possible to point it at the root install directory

 

[Saiber77]

I see this is a pretty old post, however it doesn't seem to be answered. I'll throw my 2¢ in if it's helpful to anyone else looking to run an offline SFC /scannow and to answer the question of the OP.
Assuming you can open the command prompt and verify the drive letter of your windows drive (let's say it's C: as it usually is from this boot environment) you type in "C:" to change to that drive, then type "dir" to verify the contents of the drive to make sure it is your windows drive. Type in "sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=C:\Windows".

You would want to type this all in without the "" Quote marks of course...
In the event your windows drive is not C: you can cycle through drive letters C: D: E: F: etc... in order to discover it all the while typing "dir" each time you land on a drive letter and when you see all the folders including "Users" and "Windows" and then change the above sfc command to reflect the drive letter change. You can also go into Diskpart and find the drive letter that way but I find it to be easier and more innocuous to just type in random drive letters until you land on the correct one but it is usually C: