I've been doing some additional digging. I'm no further along unfortunately. But I have been trying a few things, looking at various articles and I have some questions, apologies for what will be a pretty long post
The partitions in question,
X: BOOT
D: local drive
Most articles relating to errors with
ntoskrnl.exe and
wdf01000.sys seem to indicate that either SFC or DISM should resolve them but neither will seemingly run for me.
Here is the Dart that I have access to.
Running the SFC Scan from here always comes back telling me everything is fine (No corrupt system files were detected), it writes the log for this on X: where as i believe the problem is on D: (the main partition), is the scan running incorrectly?
I've also previously run the Solution Wizard which again comes back telling me there are no issues (No corrupt system files were detected). The Disk Commander i don't know enough about what this might do, to attempt any fixes using that.
I can get into Explorer though so i can at least dig around and see what's what.
So i've been running SFC/DISM and CHkDSK attempts via Command Line. Since swapping to the new disk it doesn't come back with any check-disk issues so i've stopped running it.
The following is what i'm seeing every time i run SFC
I'm not sure if this is related, but in an attempt to get it working i renamed the old SFC file to CBS_old. But it never generates a new SFC file, is this why it's failing to run?
Using DISM i get the following
The image version's are slightly different, could this be the problem?
I have a CBS and DISM log that's been created on X: (i think this CBS log must be being generated from running the SFC Scan from within Dart). Is it worth me attaching both here? I have a DISM log on D: but it's dated back to before all the problems began (and was generated on the old disk).
Looking at alternative ways of resolving this.
On this
thread (point 7) it talks about re-registering
wdf01000.sys. But i'm not confident trying something like that without seeing if it's worth while first.
Another suggestion is to roll back the registry, as mentioned
here (under method 11) however, having compared the system32/config and system32/config/regBack folders there's only 2 differences, the SOFTWARE and SYSTEM files are seemingly being updated every time i restart the machine and it kicks into the RE. So the rollback, these 2 files are dated back to the last time i must of successfully started up the other disk before it started having problems.
system32/config
system32/config/regback
Is it worth attempting a registry rollback or could this cause more issues? The last thing i want is to lose access to the data entirely
I've looked into maybe software to try and help but those which claim to help fix Windows errors all require me to get into Windows itself (Fortect being one i see mentioned quite a lot).
I've had a look to see what would be lost should i choose to 'refresh' the installation through the RE but it's said it won't work either.
Quite a few seem to say checking out the Windows Logs could point to the issues but it's not generating a log, when i open up Computer Management from Dart i get the following error
Why is a Windows Installation not set and can i set it to work in this instance?
As a last resort i'm not against doing a fresh installation with the Windows 10 CD i have but i have queries about doing so.
- I'd need my Windows key from the 8.1 installation (i don't access to it), is there someway of me finding out what it is from the drive?
- If i installed Windows 10 on a new partition on the SSD alongside 8.1 (so duel boot), would that allow me more options on fixing Windows 8.1 from within a fully working Windows 10?
I can at least get my files over using Explorer from within Dart, but i'm not sure it'll allow me to just import settings into newly installed programs and continue on as if nothing has happened and that is 100% of the reason i'd prefer to try and fix it rather than just start over and copy files in.
Apologies over the length of this post but more detail is always better, right?
