Inaccessible Boot Device error in Windows 10

FINAL PART:

The patch that is now offered on windows update, does not cause blue screens. 

But you won’t get to install it because it is a two step process and the second most important step won’t happen because the second half of the patch happens after another reboot and your machine will only boot once.

After booting from recovery media, locate your windows drive.  It should be the only drive that has a Users**{your name}**  folder

Determine which drive your windows is on. (It probably won't be C: in the recovery environment)

You can type DIR D:\users or DIR E:\users etc. until you see your files on your hard drive.

Use that letter in the repair procedure.  The windows letter is NEVER X:

Then follow the instructions (CAREFULLY).  Remember you can use notepad in the recovery environment.  Also you can mark and copy the long names of the patches from the DOS windows and paste them in a notepad file. Create a batch file from the notepad files that looks like this:  (in my case the windows drive letter was e: yours may be different.  Note the dates on the packages.  You should only need to remove the latest one.)

This was the batch file I created in notepad to fix the problem.

I put the pause in so you can verify which Packages are installed in your version of windows.  You need only remove the latest 2018 dated package.

MD E:\TEMP

MD E:\TEMP\PACKAGES

DISM /IMAGE:E:\  /GET-PACKAGES

PAUSE

DISM /IMAGE:E:\ /REMOVE-PACKAGE /PACKAGENAME:PACKAGE_FOR_ROLLUPFIX~31BF3856AD364E35~AMD64~~16299.192.1.9 /SCRATCHDIR:E:\TEMP\PACKAGES

(that’s all on one line).

reboot

(that's all one line)

reboot

The system should now boot into windows at this point.

(you may have to do another startup repair, but the system should boot. Even if it says that it can't fix the startup problem, Continue on to Load windows.  If it still won't boot, you may have to remove more packages.)

Once booted, remember you may not be able to boot again! (at least I wasn't and trying the procedure again did not produce a bootable machine. The patches that caused this condition are only half way installed. The remainder of the patch that caused this condition gets installed just before entering windows on your first reboot. So you might only be able to boot this machine once!!!)

My next step is to try doing a repair install (same version upgrade) from within windows.

Once windows boots for the first time, make sure you check your system restore settings. On both machines that had this symptom, system restore was turned off. This may be by design of the update that addresses Meltown and Spectre, but I can't be sure.

While you are booted, insert the your Windows 10 install DVD or Flash drive. If have only recovery media and not the full install DVD or flash drive, you will need to download it now. If you have bootable install media, skip the Next Paragraph.

You will need to download and run the media creation tool.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Download the Media Creation Tool and run it.

**Do not select update now (**Although this may work) You want to save the image on your hard drive so you do not need to download it again.

If you don't have an 8Gb Flash drive or a dual layer (9GB not 4.5Gb) blank DVD, simply download the ISO image to a place that you can find again on your hard drive.

Once it is downloaded, you can mount the DVD by right clicking the ISO image and click open with and select windows explorer.

(Yes you can just click on the image and mount it usually, but some DVD suites don't work that way. Right click-"Open with" always works)

The Next Paragraph

Insert your Windows 10 media or open the mounted ISO image you just downloaded. Browse to that media.

**Run the Setup program. (**this will start the windows 10 install)

Select Install Windows, Select upgrade, Do not get the latest updates (You can get them after the install and after Restore points have been made.)

The upgrade (repair) install will preserve all your programs and files. I may take between 1.5 and 2.5 hours to complete. During the install, it replaces the files that cause the blue screen and also clears all the pending updates.

After you complete the update, check system protection settings. Right click start and click on search (near the bottom) and type in "system protection" (without the quotes) This will take you to the system protection (restore) settings.

Make sure that system restore is turned on for your windows drive (usually C:). If this is an imaged drive, you will have to configure System Restore to protect Your C: drive and not a phantom C: drive)

Once system restore is turned on for your drive, make at least two system restore points.

When Microsoft finally re-releases a fixed version of the patch that caused this, you can breath a sigh of relief. (they have.)

There may be another way to resolve this by identifying the exact cause of the blue screen and taking other steps, but for now (if your error was caused by the recent updates,) for the bad meltdown/Spectre patches, this always works.

wiz

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I had the same error and tried many other possible repair solutions from other sited.  I followed this and uninstalled the last package and my system is back alive and working again

in my case D was my drive

and I had to add a space in the ?Dism /Image:D:\  /Get-Packages"   command to get it to work  space between "\ /"

Thanks

Mike

From 

https://aka.ms/I72l5n

Hello,

We worked on the issue over the weekend. Some interesting facts.

1. We chose the in-place upgrade on the running machines. This worked smoothly. The new image needs to be downloaded from MS site. Older images won't let you preserve apps and settings meaning it would not be an "in place upgrade".
2. We had one machine with repeated BSOD after a second reboot. Dism /cleanup-image  with install image heleped, but the packages were left in corrupted state. When the machine was back on, in place upgrade worked just great.
3. We have the Windows Update Service disabled now. We do not want any more trouble. For the critical PCs we use now Clonezilla (open software for imaging HDDs ). After successful clone (image stored to network server) we will be turning on Windows update service  only to install updates. After windows updates completes, the Windows Update service will be disabled. This way time wasted in case of unsuccessful Windows Update will be limited only to restore the image with Clonezilla from the network server.
4. Interesting! We found out that all of the machines affected had dual partition table problem. Our sample is very small though.  The machines that weren't affected had either GPT or MBR. On the machines affected existed both MBR & GPT - like working MBR and corrupted abandoned GPT (or the other way round). Removing the unneeded partition table caused a small boot problem - bootrec /fixboot was fixing it. Windows  partition tools did not show the problem that there exist two partition tables, but on Linux console I could easily clean up the not needed partition table using sgdisk -z  or fdisk command line tools.