Cannot access OS or properly boot from Boot drive after a Windows update

Question

I updated Windows 11 last night, slept, woke up, and used it a little before going to work. When I got back, the PC was on, but on the BIOS screen instead of the desktop or lock screen. I tried to boot from my SSD to find that it wasn’t being shown as a boot drive in my BIOS, but it was shown in my listed drives on the BIOS. It, and my other drives are also verified as readable in the repair menu (I am booting from a Media Creation Tool to try and fix this). I’ve tried a bunch of solutions on the internet and this website to no avail. I always get roadblocked by errors or command line responses and am basically at the end of my rope

This is what happens when I try to restore before the update was installed:

I get this message when trying Startup Repair:

These are what I get when trying to rollback updates:

This is the result to me trying to use the RegBack method, it says the drive is write protected:

This is what happens when I try the bootrec method, it tells me my access is denied:

This is the result to attempting chkdsk, again, telling me my drive is write protected:

Trying to format the EFI volume of my boot drive, again AGAIN telling me the drive is write protected:

Me trying the next step of the EFI volume method, telling me my access is denied:

Basically my problem seems to be that Windows is holding Windows hostage. It won’t let my refresh my install, or proceed with repairing it by continuing through with the OS installation process. It really seems like this is happening out of absolutely nowhere and like my problem seems very unique. I’m also quite aware this could be something BIOS related, and if that’s the case, I’m using a ASUS X570 motherboard. Please get back to this post as soon as possible if theres any solution.

Answer 1

Hello, I’m Virginia, I have 20 years of expertise in fixing my own & friends’ PC problems.

Sorry to hear you’re experiencing problems.

How old is the drive? Usually if the media states it is write protected (& it is not an SD card which has a write protection switch) then the drive has failed.

Do you have another PC on which you can download Macrium Reflect? If yes then please do that & create their boot media, then boot the problem pc with this & see if the drive is shown, if it is then please create an image of the drive in case you need to clean install Windows.

You can also try their ‘fix boot problems’ which works better than Windows own commands.

Answer 2

The drive is almost a year old to the date. I can’t say I’ve done anything to abuse the drive so I’m really crossing my fingers that it’s not the case, but the files are showing in the command prompt’s directory and appear to be accessible, so I’m optimistic its a different problem

Answer 3

You may need to clean install Windows if the Macrium boot usb cannot repair the boot files.

Answer 4

Try chkdsk again but use this cmd:

chkdsk c: /f/r/x

If c isn’t the windows partition when you use cmd then let me know.

There are other options but these seem to be for external drives.

Open cmd prompt with admin & enter-

Diskpart

List disk

Select disk X (where x is the drive number of Windows)

attributes disk clear readonly

Exit

Exit

Answer 5

The error you are seeing is referring to a Windows Resource Manager as the error shows.

You have made many changes to your system which may have caused additional problems.

For now, if you could run and post the results of the command below when run in an admin command prompt, it may tell us something.

bcdedit

You also are shown a path to the Srttrails.txt file which is a log you can check. Windows\System32\Logfiles\SRT\SrtTrail.txt

ERROR_RM_NOT_ACTIVE

6801 (0x1A91)

Transaction support within the specified resource manager is not started or was shut down due to an error.