Lately I have had an epidemic of these blue screen crashes on about a dozen or so computers. They have been mostly desktop pc's and all in ones. Initially, I thought it might be some buggy windows updates that are causing this but it seems like it's clients running into bad luck and their hard drives are failing. The crashes have varying bsod codes they are not hal related the image is just for illustrative purposes. The common theme seems to be that they are all running with traditional mechanical hard drives and unfortunately those types of drives do crash. In some cases the computer goes into a loop where it boots into the windows recovery but none of the fixes work. I tried on all of these to get the windows startup environment repaired but nothing worked. Even booting from a usb flash and running the bootrec /rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot or bootrec /fixmbr. Running a chkdsk on the hard drive has also been futile. In some cases it finds errors on the drive and fixes them, in other cases it finds nothing wrong. But the bottom line is no matter what fixes I've tried the computer just won't boot. The solution in all of the case has been to replace the boot drive with an SSD , re-install windows and transfer the data to the new drive.
One other issue with the bootrec which has also popped up is the bootrec/ fixboot is giving an error message that access is denied. There is a fix for this that has worked for some but I have not had any success with it. The fix is to locate the efi partition using diskpart, assign a drive letter to it then format it. After that you can run this command bcdboot c:\windows /s N: /f UEFI to fix the efi partition. Make sure you use the correct drive letter in most cases if you booted from a flash drive your original c: drive will be a different letter.
This is the procedure if you are interested:
Boot from a USB flash drive
From the initial Windows screen, accept the default settings for the language to install, the time and currency format as well as the keyboard or input method. Next, click the Repair your computer link instead of Install now.
Select Troubleshoot and then Advanced Options.
Select Command Prompt.
Type diskpart and press Enter key.
Type list disk and press Enter. Now pay attention to the disk number and identify which one is the boot disk. Usually, it is Disk 0; if not, find the disk number in your own case and remember to type the correct one in the following relevant steps.
Type select disk 0 and press Enter.
Type list volume and press Enter. Now pay attention to the volume number of the EFI partition. This step can be some what troublesome the EFI partion may not have show the name. If this is the case type exit and go back to the command prompt. Type diskmgmt.msc that will open the windows disk manager. There you should clearly see the efi partition make note of it's size. This will help you identify it in diskpart now type diskpart and proceed.
Type select volume N and press Enter. Also, type the one in your own case instead of N.
Type assign letter=N: and press Enter. N: can be replaced by any drive letter that is not taken by any partition. Remember which drive letter you assign here for it is rather useful in the rest steps.
Type exit and press Enter to leave diskpart.
Now type N: (the drive lettered you just assigned) and hit Enter.
Type format N: /FS:FAT32 and hit Enter.
Type bcdboot C:\windows /s N: /f UEFI and hit Enter. Once again make sure you use the correct drive letter in most cases if you booted from a flash drive your original c: drive will be a different letter.
This is the process, I hope it works for you. If you have any suggestions on how to fix some of these I would love to hear it. If you are on my website and looking for technical help with a blue screen crash or other computer related issue. Shoot me an email or give me a call.