Troubleshooting Boot and Startup Problems

This section presents approaches to solving problems that can occur during the Windows startup process as a result of hard disk corruption, file corruption, missing files, and third-party driver bugs. First we describe three Windows boot-problem recovery modes: last known good, safe mode, and Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). Then we present common boot problems, their causes, and approaches to solving them. The solutions refer to last known good, safe mode, WinRE, and other tools that ship with Windows.

Last Known Good

Last known good (LKG) is a useful mechanism for getting a system that crashes during the boot process back to a bootable state. Because the system’s configuration settings are stored ...

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