Major bug/issue:
TL;DR
difficult to recover OS as boot drive lacks few options such as newer recoveries and more.
Weird issues, my troubleshoot journey, and hoping to help as many as possible.
okay, so this has happened to me a second time now and I wish I could get logs for debugging and helping OP but sadly I lose access to a lot of data when the bug occurs.
I accessed my laptop randomly last night for work and it showed me a bluescreen of death even before starting up. mine is a UEFI Setup and it says 0x000001 something, windows.efi failed to load. when I go to boot options and choose efi SSD partition to boot from manually, the other BSOD it shows is related to BCD (boot record related) error. This is second time I have been left out of my system without any code execution on my part to warrant such a data loss (basically windows screwing itself up).
I luckily always have extra 50 gigs which I have unallocated on my same SSD for performance reasons and so I quickly created a new partition and flashed another Harmony build (same like what i did last time), so now my computer technically has two windows, one that is new and boots, and one THAT was.. it shows up in boot manager at start everytime as a volume to boot from but it shows same error and i need quick access to files anyway so it's pointless to boot from previous one.
What's not pointless is trying to troubleshoot the drive/partition with a new working windows in a new drive (5 hours, twice and totally not worth it xD )
I tried to troubleshoot it in various of ways and
realized some odd shortcomings of the build (Harmony) I was using (no shade against FBConan, just stating out facts and trying to have a constructive discussion here)
1. The harmony build that is bundled up with other builds for freeleech when booted from USB Directly goes after preloader to choose OS > Choose drive > Install. It skips past the language screen where more importantly the option for "repair my computer" also exists. if that option was available, a lot of issues might have been easily fixable as usually windows is good with taking a usb mounted windows' files as reference and repairing a corrupted one! so if possible,
please if possible, have that flexibility a repair option in your installers for your future builds.
2. There is supposed to be a recovery.wim/esd type file which is missing, this is the file that you execute for your recovery options and see system restore and other options in a windows 8.1 metro-like UI (When you hold the shift key).
The recovery that's included with the build has half the options missing. just to make sure that it's not me screwing up, I downloaded a whole new official windows image and extracted the recovery file out of it 's .esd (or whatever it's called) and voila, my system restore and few extra options were back. It's kinda difficult to do this adding recovery manually when your computer is not working, so a working and full optioned recovery would save alot of asses in case.
TBH these above two were the pain points for features that obviosly wouldn't take too much time/ already exist and kinda are a necessity to some degree in case of things go south, so I had to point them out.
Continue for story-------
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3. obviously it was a no brainer to download official windows and try using it's repair option but because it quickly detects lack of tpm when double click run, I didnt go into much hassle of dealing with it and bypassing it, (Given the guesswork of what version I have vs the one I am downloading was also a factor).
4. sfc /scannow shows alot of problems by default. even on a fresh install sfc doesn't work. you can make it work by using DISM tool to fix it and then have a non corrupted sfc tool to check file systems for repair, but that's the first thing I sometimes run to ensure haveing the tools ready. however, as this windows was corrupted, My first line of defense was to booting from USB Drive of harmony and pressing shift+f10 to access command line and try sfc /scannow command there to fix anything system-related (normally such things do get fixed but for some reasons my sfc didn't work. it never works in shift-f10 view on install screen. trying DISM to fix sfc in that mode is also a no go as it requires /online to do so (you can be using /offline in DISM to achieve the same but it's a pain and almost impossible to point it to a windows directory correctly as it never works.).
5. after quickly installing new windows I could easily access previous windows files, but all my installations and services are now stuck in a drive in an installation that doesn't work as a software system. I clicked on c:\windows folder and it said it was corrupted and couldnt be read (C: here is old C:\ not the new installation's). so I simply checked it for error using 'chkdsk'/right-click>properties>check-for-errors and the windows folder in the volume just entirely disappeared. LOL. The funny part is, if I check the size of that drive in properties, it's 8-10GB short of what it should be if i do the math, so I know /windows folder data is there, but just in some data blackhole. which means it exists but is major major corrupted and pointed all wrong. (yes my hidden files are always visible, and no, windows folder shouldn't hide itself even if it wasn't an option i selected in the view options)
WHY am I pointing this out? simply to help OP in case he is able to understand better from my noob troubleshooting and address this OS Corruption issue at a core level for a good user experience for all the users.
Last but not the least, I know it's an oddly corrupted install because when I do bootrec /scanOS (in shift+f10 cmd mode), it shows a file in my C:/ (older C:/), that is compatible with a mounting point for a boot record but has no mount to it yet. I tried doing bootrec /fixboot but the access was denied. I had multiple other troubleshooting to do just to figure out the quickest way to fix the issue for this particular build and then share that here with you instead, but sadly that's where my journey ended.
in short:- Installing bluestacks and other software again is a pain mahn! hope you can help with a valid recovery within the install and a "repair my computer" option instead of direct install screen. till then, I will be off Harmony for now as it's the second time this week (And no, I do not install bad actors on my systems to corrupt or keep my system in any compromised state per se, maybe it's tpm/conflicting file/something else.) But my boot is getting knocked off again and again and stops recognizing an install altogether.
It's a legit sad thing for me coz i love this build way too much, only windows 11 install that was blazing fast for me and had none of the issues my official windows 11 faced. Thanks for the work
@FBConan , keep building, Happy holidays.
. BTW it also can be booted from Ventoy.