Re: [Win10 1607] Manually Edited System Keys & Files - Later, After Updating, No Boot
Hello and thank you for the response.
*Rant (non-pertinent at this point, feel free to ignore)*
After three weeks of dealing with the issue and researching I came to the conclusion that it simply was not worth the effort to try and recover my environment. I found out too late that Microsoft didn't account for UEFI & USB in the Win RE (even though the Windows Media Creation Tool knows full well that it was booted in UEFI), and so any commands that had been run previously which default to the current system drive in memory did nothing to my actual Windows environment, and by that point it was already an immense task trying to back-track and determine what all had been successful and what hadn't.
The root cause of the issue, which comes up commonly on these forums and many others as well it seems, was Windows RE "startup repair" clobbering my drive lettering in the first place because it fails to account for so many obvious situations, none the least being as pertinent as taking into account the possibility of systems having both MBR & GPT drives and drives with old MS installation partitions, and since the utility doesn't ask the user for any input whatsoever, the actions performed were entirely incorrect. By some stroke of genius programming which couldn't possibly at all be the result of laziness (and by extension extremely poor ITIL practices) the utility decides, with no user input whatsoever, that even though the RE was loaded from a different psychical disk entirely which contains thousands upon thousands of registry keys/system files/partition information/etc right on the very root, it's going to NOT take ANY of that into account and instead reconfigure the entire system to boot into whatever installation comes up first from the equivalent (or actual) result from a simple "bootrec /scanos".
After realizing these very pertinent lack of considerations on Microsoft's behalf, none of which are mentioned until you actually look them up because you have the problem, when the Windows 7 recovery console came up my heart sank, and it then became a game of figuring out "what did I all do up until this point? How do I know what actually worked and what didn't?", and I still stupidly gave it a try. The thing is, when you realize that you're so far deep after seeing your BCD file grow to 23 entries long, looking at contradictory CBS and DISM logs and not able to make out why the same errors continue to appear but aren't at all able to be traced back when checking deeper in WMIC (likely a result of the confusion caused by UEFI bootable USB drives), and in the end (although this was on me), corrupted partition entries on the drive sectors... you just kind of give up.
As a last-ditch effort I overwrote any mismatched files in all system directories, reset permissions by exporting an ACL list with all the system account configurations from a clean 1607 install and applying it to my image, and everything again. I was likely pretty close as I was able to get the image recognized but it would only go to the boot menu as I had already ruined the system reserved partition due to the sheer confusion of me (and apparently Windows itself as well) executing commands on one drive and not the other without ever knowing it (it doesn't help at all that SFC returns quite a lot of errors when it is run against the fresh Win Media Center Creation, and later the Win 1607, USB images).
*/end rant*
The only issue I have at this point is that I know I made, not one, but a total of three separate, offline (to other drives) backups of that drive before and AFTER stripping all ACL/ACS and file attributes from the drive, and yet for some reason I'm completely missing the root:\Users\ directory which is the only directory I actually cared about and is the most important and essential.
There's a file in the current "$WINDOWS.~BT" directory which is labeled "FolderMoveLog.txt" detailing moves from "Window.old" to "Windows" on the system root, but none of the entries reference any files from my previous installation. For example, here is how one of the entries looks-
"C:\Windows.old\Users\Christopher\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\CurrentDatabase_400.wmdb|C:\Users\Christopher\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\CurrentDatabase_400.wmdb|H|CURREN~1.WMD"
The user "Christopher" was not the name of any user on my previous installation, only my current. There are no references to my previous user account. Is that directory gone for good (especially considering the drive was freshly formatted prior to the new installation)? Could the Panther\Rollback directory be useful at all? Ex-
"C:\Windows\Panther\Rollback\MachineIndependent\Transformers\CBS\boot_volume\Users"
Thank you.