Windows 10 boot loop, but only sometimes

[ahens]

Hi there,

I was playing a game when my Windows 10 machine had a BSOD (not the first time with that particular game...). When the machine rebooted, it came up with a black screen (monitor not detecting a signal). This is also not the first time this has happened, I believe it's a hardware compatibility issue. I have set it up so that clicking the computer's power button restarts it to recover from just this situation, which I attempted. However this time it did not restart so after a few minutes I held the button down to kill it.

When I powered it back on it immediately crashed again with a BSOD with error CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED. It now is either boot looping with this error or sometimes booting into Windows. I'm not sure why the inconsistency. When it does boot into Windows despite a normal looking login screen, it is not happy. After entering my password, it seems as though explorer.exe never fully starts. The taskbar blinks in and out a little faster than once a second. I can bring up the ctrl-alt-del menu, but task manager will not come up. I can't use Win+R to bring up the Run dialog either.

The reason this post is here is that I'm afraid it might have been installing updates at that time that I hard reset it.

I made a Windows 10 boot disk on a USB stick and have used that to get into a clean recovery environment, but I've not had luck in fixing the issue. I have tried:

(Note I have confirmed D: is the drive letter mapping for my main Windows disk with BCDEdit and by checking the disk's contents.)

1. X:\Windows\System32\chkdsk.exe D: /f and X:\Windows\System32\chkdsk.exe D: /r It did find an error originally and fixed it, but that did not change any behavior.
2. X:\Windows\System32\sfc.exe /scannow /offbootdir=D:\ /offwindir=D:\Windows /offlogfile=E:\support\sfc.log This gives the error "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation."
3. X:\Windows\System32\dism.exe /ScratchDir=C:\scratch /Image:D:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth This fails around 51% with "Error: 605 The specified buffer contains ill-formed data." I have also tried this with the additional switches /Source:esd:E:\Sources\install.esd:1 /limitaccess with the same results.
4. SFCFix.exe did not work as I could only try running it from the RE and it gave an error indicating the wrong Windows version.

I have attached the CBS folder from the D: drive, as the one from the X: drive had only the FilterList.log file. I also attached the SFC and DISM logs captured directly. The main relevant error seems to be:

2020-07-16 19:19:29, Error                 CSI    00000009@2020/7/17:03:19:29.724 (F) onecore\base\wcp\sil\ntsystem.cpp(3674): Error c0000242 [Error,Facility=(system),Code=578 (0x0242)] originated in function Windows::Rtl::SystemImplementation::DirectFileSystemProvider::SysReadFile expression: (null)
[gle=0x80004005]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Info                  CBS    Added X:\windows\Logs\DISM\dism.log to WER report.
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Info                  CBS    Not able to add current session file to offline WER report. [HRESULT = 0x80070002 - ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Info                  CBS    Not able to add pending.xml to offline WER report. [HRESULT = 0x80070002 - ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Error                 CSI    0000000a (F) c0000242 [Error,Facility=(system),Code=578 (0x0242)] #1636106# from Windows::Rtl::SystemImplementation::DirectFileSystemProvider::SysReadFile(h = 8bfc ('\Device\HarddiskVolume5\Windows\WinSxS\wow64_microsoft-windows-ntdll_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.19041.207_none_415109dc8f3c6aa6\ntdll.dll'), evt = 0, apcr = NULL, apcc = NULL, iosb = @0x943277b620, data = {l:0 b:}, byteoffset = 0, key = (null))
[gle=0xd0000242]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Error                 CSI    0000000b (F) c0000242 [Error,Facility=(system),Code=578 (0x0242)] #1636105# from Windows::Rtl::SystemImplementation::CFile::ReadFile(Flags = 3, Buffer = {l:0 ml:1692320 b:}, Offset = 0, Disposition = 0)[gle=0xd0000242]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Info                  CSI    0000000c Direct SIL provider: Number of files opened: 35305.
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Error                 CSI    0000000d (F) c0000242 [Error,Facility=(system),Code=578 (0x0242)] #161# from CCSDirect::EnumStoreCorruptions(...)[gle=0xd0000242]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Error                 CSI    0000000e (F) HRESULT_FROM_WIN32(605) #160# from Windows::COM::CStorePendingStoreRepairTxn_IStorePendingStoreRepairTransaction::Detect(Flags = 4, cancelEvt = 3fc (''), disp = 0)[gle=0x8007025d]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Error                 CBS    Rept: Failed to call CSI detect. [HRESULT = 0x8007025d - ERROR_BAD_COMPRESSION_BUFFER]
2020-07-16 19:19:29, Info                  CBS    Failed to check CSI store. [HRESULT = 0x8007025d - ERROR_BAD_COMPRESSION_BUFFER]

from dism.log.

Very much thanks in advance for any help you can give. I saw a few other threads in this forum that seemed to be able to resolve similar issues, but the fixes looked to be very user specific.