Windows died(?) - Edge is MIA, Start Menu too, Settings is slow

Kaotik

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Long story short, my Windows 10 is installed on Samsung 830 SSD, it's upgrade installation on top of Windows 8.1

Earlier today, everything pretty much froze, after I finally got Task Manager open, it reported my SSD's activity to be 100% even though nothing was really writing to or reading from it, and it's average response time jumped at times up to tens of thousands of milliseconds.

After forced restart, I got "Disk read error", after few restarts and power offs/ons, I got past it, and into Windows troubleshooting. I did chkdsk on my Windows partition, and it fixed bunch of files/file links, which after everything was supposed to be fine, no bad sectors etc either. But it wasn't.

After I got to Windows, I didn't have my Edge browser icon anywhere (and trying to start it from command line doesn't seem to work either), and my Start menu didn't work at all, except for the right click menu which worked fine. File Explorer works, but starting it first time is really slow. PC Settings works, but starts really slowly.

Everything else seems to work just fine, I can start my applications/programs via Win+R or via File Explorer

Since there doesn't seem to be the "refresh PC" option, which would keep my programs (non Windows Store ones anyway) and files, I tried to reinstall Windows on top of itself while keeping apps / files etc.

Reinstall went fine, except all the same issues are still there.

sfc /scannow didn't and still doesn't find any problems
Samsung Magician & CrystalDisk Info both say my SSD is fine, no issues with it

Anyone got any ideas how to fix this without doing clean install of Windows, which would mean reinstalling far, far too many programs for my liking?
 
I've had some strange hiccups with win 10 and for me a reboot login wait till disk activity stops (don't start any programs) then reboot again helped me a few times. And another time getting windows update to work helped.

edit - have you tried disabling anti-virus. Also once I noticed that sometime windows is doing something and you just need to let it work through it.
 
Run the windows10 installer again (booting from a flash stick or something) and choose "repair"?

If that doesn't fix things, just take it like a man and nuke everything from orbit. I did that today. A cheap USB3 Samsung flash drive that's just a tiny little nubbin sticking out of the port made the install process really rather quick. It was almost enjoyable actually. :)

Of course, now I have to install my softwares again, but that's alright. Now I get a clean, fresh install, instead of one filled with win8 baggage.
 
at least when starting the win10 setup from Windows it didn't offer "repair", just the option to install it on top of the windows and keep all my stuff (which I did, didn't solve anything)

got a tip from another forum that it could be as simple as some "universal apps" being corrupted, would fit the symptoms, and they can be re-insalled via powershell apparently, trying that now
 
Settings>Update&Security>Recovery>Reset this PC, should allow you to reinstall windows with an option to leave your files, or remove them.
 
Meh. Even after re-install, AMD driver is having hard time to properly wake my monitor up from power save.

...How effin hard can it be to get this working, seriously? Monitor powersave has been around since the friggin 1990s.
 
so the disk is broken or not? does the SMART says something?

btw on my W8 laptop last year the metro apps almost all dead. i think i posted the powershell script in B3D or somewhere...
 
so the disk is broken or not? does the SMART says something?
SMART says it's fine (though apparently sometimes SMART says it's fine even if it's not)
btw on my W8 laptop last year the metro apps almost all dead. i think i posted the powershell script in B3D or somewhere...
I tried 2 different powershell scripts to fix it, no luck.
I also somehow got the drive "locked" so I couldn't use "reset windows" option nor just install it (again) on top of itself, and at some point even the boot-stuff got fubar'ed and couldn't be fixed (bootrc /rebuildbcd couldn't find the device or some such)

After nuking the SSD and it's partitions, I did a fresh install without issues and haven't faced any issues yet
 
I wouldnt trust the SSD checking info, I had the same issue recently where no errors were reported but actually using the SSD you could see all was not fine
 
I had this problem on the fast ring with threshold 2. I just reinstalled it and didn't have a problem again.
 
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