We had a storm that knocked up power (maybe twice in ~10 sec). Some PCs at work do not have UPSs, most are set to keep Off after power loss. Next day Win7 machines simply started without any issues. Win10, WinSrv had some variations (Automatic services not starting ??), but in general are also Ok. Except one. Of course it is my Win10 dev box.
Upon powering up after a long "pause" with DELL logo on a blank screen (no status whatsoever!) it finally showed a line underneath, mentioning recovery or repair. I didn't give it much thought (it was reasonably to be expected) - until 15-20 min later when the screen changed to blue with a message "Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC":
I chose "Advanced options", followed by "Continue"; that resulted in auto-reboot with same sequence and message.
So now I went into "Troubleshoot", launched Command Prompt and opened the SrtTrail.txt log.
The log goes through a ~dozen successfully completed tests and stumbles on "Check for installed LCU", which is also "successfully completed" (?) but with "Error code 0x17". This pattern is repeated twice - for two boot attempts I made:
This is a first time I even saw an abbreviation LCU, so Google to the rescue, right? ..
Hmm, wrong!
In the first ~twenty results "Error code 0x17" is mentioned only once and cursory (no description is given).
Simplifying Google search to "LCU 0x17" yields no difference in results.
I cannot find any explanation as to what does that error mean, thunk you, Micro$crap!
I ran chkdsk c: /scan, that produced no errors whatsoever, listing only 3 bad clusters. This can't be it!!
I looked at each log file (for some reason they all have .txt extension, and a single SrtTrail.log is binary?) in c:\windows\system32\logfiles\srt\, but did not spot anything unusual. Granted, I do not have versions of these files from normal boot times, so I'm comparing to samples from other machines and online, but still..
One thing looked odd: disklayout.txt has Free space as 1024 KB on a 931 GB partition:
But dir and chkdsk both indicate that ~630 GB is available on HDD!
Following this article [instead of deleting] I renamed C:\Windows\Servicing\LCU into lcu2, but that had no effect (Auto Recovery launches again). The folder has 2 subfolders dated Apr-12 and May-25 this year, so they should have been applied already:
There were no hardware or software issues on this PC. To me it looks that the HDD does not have any problems. Why does Windows keep running Automatic Repair? Where can I see a boot log?
Microsoft forums mostly "recommend" Restore. And I would follow, if I had trust that "none of my files will get hurt", unfortunately experience tells a different story. Auto Repair had similar problems since 2014 at least..
I'm gonna try the following commands as suggested in multiple places:
chkdsk c: /f
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bcdboot c:\windows /s c:
But I wonder why might a power failure damage any of the BCD/boot sectors? These are not constantly being written to!
There is a [single? I'd expect more, since Win10 updates are being pushed every month] Restore Point from Jun-06, but I'm sure it will mess up the context (open programs and their state), so I'm trying to find a solution that avoids any "nuclear" options like restore or clean install. I can take the HDD out and connect it to another machine and save everything, but ideally I'd like not to go to those lengths. Understanding what exactly is happening will determine the course of action. Problem is "Auto Recovery couldn't recover" message is not helpful at all.
Knowing now that LCU stands for Last Cumulative Update does not help either. They keep coming up with yet new abbreviations (SSU, SRT, CBS and so on) instead of making things simple, efficient, robust and explicit! Complexity is through the roof, but documentation is really lacking. All you see in UI is a spinning doughnut..
And all the crap (UEFI, SecureBoot, hidden BCD and Recovery partitions, and so on) fails with simple loss of power??
Yet to this day there is no way to automatically clean up files in %TEMP% folder! Are you frakking kidding me?
Yes, I'm pissed, because instead of working on my project I'm now spending a second day trying to revive this machine without loosing too much context. [/End rant], but when are we (and they!) gonna learn to do things properly?
What exactly does this 'LCU error code 0x17' mean? What does Windows attempt at boot that is failing?
