When Windows goes wrong visit your friends chkdsk, dism, and sfc
Recently my son and I put together a new Adabox and plugged it into the Surface Pro he works on and got exclamation boxes under the device manager. Never a good sign. Rather than a double reset of the microcontroller showing a drive for the device, we had two exclamation boxes. USB device not recognized.
Knowing this was going to be an investment of time, I put it off and let him use any other computer (because the rest of the laptops and desktops worked fine) to do his programming on the Adafruit devices.
Then one foggy afternoon in Redmond, I sat down with the world wide web and started on the path to getting this Surface happy again. Spoilers: happy ending.
I had recently worked on a failing hard drive and I was familiar with the basic tools here:
- Chkdsk
- Dism
- Sfc
That hard disk was unrecoverable but sometimes it works out in other situations like this.
A couple of good articles on the tools:
- https://www.howtogeek.com/222532/how-to-repair-corrupted-windows-system-files-with-the-sfc-and-dism-commands/
- https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-dism-command-line-utility-repair-windows-10-image
I basically started with the dism command w/ restore health and was told there was a file corruption problem. I then did a chkdsk /f /r and did dism again after that. There was another issue so I did sfc /scannow and then the dism restore health command again. That worked. I had downloaded an ISO of the OS version I was using if dism needed it, but it was able to get its work done.
I restarted, attached the Adafruit board and did a double reset: success, there was the virtual drive. My son was now able to use his own Surface again.
How did the problem happen? Maybe a forced shutdown corrupted the wrong thing, we don’t know. But I think I’ll try to visit these friends more often vs. when I’m in dire need to help be ahead of any disk hijinks.
