Inaccessible Boot Device error in Windows 10

WOW no doubt your an IT guy, Sam,

You hit most if not all the points, kudos!

One thing, and certainly in addition to this Community, are you aware of a hotspot for IT people dealing with Patching and WSUS, it is Patchmanagement.org they have been dealing with all sorts if these issues. I would C&P this dissertation right into an Email over there Toooo!

Susan Bradley, whom you may have seen here is a Senior Moderator there, I and others call Her(lovingly of course) The Patch Lady! She maybe able to help you if it comes to this, with Support calls/tickets etc, you will just have to ask her at the appropriate time, here or on the ORG.

Now to your Boot Manager. Have you ever heard of, or tried EasyBCD @ NeoSmart Technologies. It is excellent for building BCD/Boot Menus. I MultiBoot and use it all the time. There are a suite of tools in it. I believe Enterprises can get a trial but they do ultimately need to pay. Private Individuals do not but you need to sign up. They will send you an Email for the purposes of helping beginners and novices. I also Donate to their cause.

If it is boot issues one should be able to solve them with that and it is definitely for MBR.

I also point you to my above post, if you haven't read it......

For the future and since we don't know where some of the problems are coming from, investigate Tweaking.com

I am not sure about Enterprise arrangements but there "Registry Backup" is excellent. I have it set to backup every time I logon. Make sure it stays on VSS though. I have had so many of MS utilities in these areas fail me multiple times over the years I turn to 3rd party products. Now with MultiBoot, Restore Point isn't supported anyway. 

How much extra work do you have after Reimaging a PC? Is it worth doing a per PC Backup? OR are you doing that as well?

Have you tried CHKDSK /b /x no deeper than the Directory clusters level?(it will delete system files if it thinks they are corrupt) Have you tried SFC /scannow? DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth? (Check the helps for variations such as /offline)

In conjunction with CHKDSK, I use Gibson Research's SpinRite. No freebies here and there is a corporate/Enterprise plan(yes he has several corporate customers). If you want to see and hear Steve talk about these issues the last 2 "Security Now" episodes on TWiT.tv are available for streaming on download. I think they would be worth while for you and your management as well.

Here is my little script that I run in Powershell.exe:

ReagentC /Info

sfc /scannow

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

As you can see I check RE agent Control to make sure the Recovery Environment is set up properly just in case I need it, even if it is Plan D.

By the way, there are WinPE variants for above, I will have to look in my notes for them but you probably are very handy with the various helps. If you have a central Boot location on a 'System' partition, on some commands that is specified separately. As you're also probably very aware List vol in DiskPart is ones friend.

Some have wondered if Symantec is causing them more trouble than it is worth???? You might want to turn one of your problem PC into a Test PC. Problem is with these problems, so varied and persistent no 2 PCs are identical in every way necessarily......

At least your not dealing with repeat updates from WU/MU!!!!

Well Sam, I believe that covers the points you brought up, hope it helps a bit and maybe you can find out what is causing these persistent and reoccurring issues as well as BSoD.

Best Regards,

Crysta

Looks like I'm not the only one having this issue. I work as the IT guy for a large office, and the past few days had been just trying to fix this issue, since almost everyday we would receive 3-4 calls from the users saying their computers are encountering this BSOD. We use HP Elitedesk 800 series desktops.

I removed the January update from the affected computers in WinPE and it booted up fine again. But then after a reboot it would go back to the same boot problem again. I went back in to WinPE and used DISM to check for any other update packages installed in January, but there were none. So even after removing the January update, it will only work until the next reboot.

What I tried before rebooting when Windows did load after removing the update:

• Update Symantec Endpoint Protection to a compatible version
• Disconnect network and then pause updates

But the blue screen came back after a reboot....

I noticed that when it doesn't work, the hard drive activity light does not turn on during the boot screen with the spinning circles, meaning no hard drive activity (we use normal HDDs, not SSDs). Normally, the hard drive activity indicator will light up rapidly when loading all the files during startup. I thought it was a hardware issue and the drive failed, but after cloning to a new working hard drive, the same issue still persists. Could the update be messing with the bootloader? We use MBR 

System restore worked at first, but then it goes back to boot loop and blue screen after a reboot. We had no choice but to reimage the computers to get them back up and running. Really Microsoft can release a new, fixed patch soon.

Thx. Then it's probably only a matter of time until I run into the "inaccessible boot device" error again.

I had the same issue with an i5-4750 ASRock B85M (with TPM module) machine. Since I didn't have a system backup I  had to reinstall Win 10 Pro to fix the error. I reinstalled it onto a factory new SSD since the message "inaccessible boot device" made me suspect a hardware error. Luckily I made backups during the reinstallation process because the error reoccured (on the brand new disk). I reset the machine today, using my trusty backup. I didn't encrypt the drive with Bitlocker this time though.

Did you all have Bitlocker enabled? Maybe that's the culprit with some machines? Do you use Norton Internet Security?

No Bitlocker or Norton on the two machines that i fixed.