Cannot boot windows 10, “bootrec /fixboot” gives “access denied”

My “always on” home desktop today appeared to be totally unresponsive. It was clear that I had only one choice to power reset it. At first it seemed that it booted into my login screen, but again my I did power reset by mistake. From this point on I wasn’t able to boot. It shows “inaccessible boot device” blue screen.

Recovery or restore doesn’t work. From cmd prompt I see my C:\ drive and all files seem to be ok, entire chkdsk shows that everything is ok with the drive.

bootrec /FixMbr works, however bootrec /fixboot gives me “access is denied.”

bootrec /scanos and bootrec /rebuildbcd both show “Total identified windows installations: 0”

I tried to run it all from the UEFI partition by enabling it from diskpart but I still get “access denied” for fixboot, no matter what I tried. There is one suggestion for the “access denied” error: to format the UEFI partition and then manually create EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ in there and retry bootrec /fixboot but I find it outlandish to even consider it.

Any suggestions? What could be wrong?

Pavel P

Posted 2018-01-13T21:00:33.130

Reputation: 1 558

Answers

I ran into the same issue, the suggestion from Darko_65 in Microsoft Answers forum is what worked for me:

"bootrec" command sometimes has problems finding proper boot device and windows installation to fix.

Use "bcdboot" command to fix boot (bcdboot requires that partitions are specified explicitly!)

bcdboot C:\windows /s S:

specifies C: as Windows partition, S: as system partition.

Use "diskpart" or "mountvol" commands to map system partition.

aoetalks

Posted 2018-01-13T21:00:33.130

Reputation: 423

4Thank you. You saved m̶y̶ ̶l̶i̶f̶e̶ my cloned win10 installation on a new SSD drive. – Toc – 2018-05-18T23:35:43.623

4Saved my bacon too. Had cloned my SSD to a new bigger one then wiped. Just 'bcdboot C:\windows' fixed it for me. – AceJordin – 2018-12-14T18:32:23.643

1Bacons are still being saved for those of us who clone to larger SSDs. – Fls'Zen – 2019-03-06T16:00:53.733

1Worked for me. Simply running bcdboot C:\windows without the /s part sufficed. – xji – 2019-10-09T09:29:29.330

Worked for Windows 7 x64 in UEFI mode too. If you don't see letter/volume on GPT disk, run diskpart, then select partition X and and set id=EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 – radioxoma – 2019-12-03T16:16:49.650

It's been much easier for me: after 2 weeks (!!) of Windows 10 not booting with UEFI not recognizing my GPT disk anymore, I simply used diskpart from an installation DVD/USB:

diskpart
list disk
sel disk 0
sel vol 1
attributes volume clear readonly
sel vol 2
attributes partition clear readonly 
sel vol 3
attributes...

...worked for me so I could boot into Windows 10 after 2 weeks, WITHOUT reinstalling.

Marcello Bassani

Posted 2018-01-13T21:00:33.130

Reputation: 11

1I've edited this answer to make the commands valid, as attributes partition... is not valid syntax and attributes volume... is the command that's likely being referred to instead, but I haven't confirmed that the answer works. – Hashim – 2019-04-16T06:22:29.900

In the answer given by @aoetalks, copying the BCD files to new mount point didnt worked for me. It always ended up saying source files not found. It could be because my /EFI directory got corrupted.

Anyways, trying to boot with a Windows 8.1 USB media worked. All the commands, bootrec /fixmbr, /fixboot, /scanos, and /rebuildbcd worked fine and I'm back to my desktop in a few minutes.

It looks like the Windows 10 bootrec has some issues.

Jimson Kannanthara James

Posted 2018-01-13T21:00:33.130

Reputation: 498