More Windows 10 troubles

After the CentOS/Phi fiasco a few days ago, I reassembled my computer only to find out that the windows drive wouldn't boot anymore. In a previous post, I talked about the trouble I had installing Windows 10. This time it loads the Windows logo and just hangs.

So I created a Windows 10 installation USB, booted to it, and launch auto repair, which of course failed. I then used the command prompt to examine the volumes and partitions on the disk. Turns out the EFI partition was missing, so I recreated it following these instructions, which basically involved shrinking the C partition, creating a new system efi partition, and then using bcdboot to write the new boot files. When I rebooted, there were 3 entries in the boot menu. One just hangs at the logo like before (probably the original), and two cause the blue Recovery screen to pop up, which of course didn't work. *Sigh...I think I'm cursed. So back to the installation usb, which now appears to not work.

That's the tricky part with OS recovery. When is it more time efficient just to start over? I think I've wasted more time trying to recover it than it would take to reinstall.

I ended up recreating the installation media and reinstalling.

Lesson learned:

1. Do not install windows with any other drives present
2. If you didn't follow lesson one, take out the other drives, wipe the drive in another computer with another program, and then reinstall windows because eventually it will mess up even if you think you fixed it.
3. Windows 10 will probably still fail again, so backup your files (luckily didn't lose anything other than time)
4. I didn't actually try this, but some people have better luck using USB 2.0 ports than USB 3.0 ports. Try that.

Update (next day): It failed to boot again. I haven't even reinstalled the other drives yet. The best part: the windows installation media won't boot now either, even after re-creating it. The drive's windows randomly booted into recovery mode once, and I tried fixing it again, but none of that helped of course. Tried doing a slow format of the usb drive and recreating the recovery media again. I then tried booting to UEFI shell, which somehow caused windows to boot.

Update (a few weeks later): I left it on for a few weeks because I didn't feel like dealing with this shit. Somehow, it magically fixed itself though. Shutdowns and boots now work fine, even after putting the CentOS NVMe and RAID array back in. 

I really think this showcases the decline of the Windows OS. From googling around, these sorts of errors are incredibly common. Granted most Linux distros can give you this much trouble, but they're free...