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Super odd issues after imaged restore, Not sure how to clean this mess
Hello all,
I have been trying to solve a problem for quite a while and still have not even figured out what the problem is.
Equipment:
7 year old Asus custom build with Intel i7 Extreme 3.3Ghz 24GB RAM, Samsung SSD, ATI Fire Pro Workstation GFX. No overclocking or additional customization.
Software:
W7 Pro 64bit. A whole bunch of commercial software that is no longer supported or out of maintenance contracts. Re-installing is either impossible or very difficult or VERY expensive.
This machine is in a critical role and ran without issue for many years. A few months ago the system disk (1 drive in a 4 drive RAID5) failed. No big deal, I put a spare in the system and it rebuilt the RAID. Without surprise - about a week later another drive failed. This time the RAID failed during rebuild and the system disk is now totally dead and un-recoverable.
Fortunately (or so I thought), I was using Acronis to keep local and cloud images. I restored the images to a new SSD drive, but it failed to boot. I spent the next 2 days chasing down a myriad of issues to try to get it back up. The final act that made it happen was restoring the backup registry. While that allowed the system to finally boot - clearly it was a last resort. There were all kinds of strange issues following this. A number of applications had to be reinstalled and many others at least lost their settings. None of these were fatal - just super annoying.
Fast forward to about 3 days ago when I got a warning that the system disk was full (0 bytes available). I was expecting about 180GB of free space. After some digging, I found that the Windows Temp folder was being filled up with cab_xxxx files of exactly the same size - 107MB each until the disk was full. I chased that down after a few hours but learned this was the tip of the iceberg.
At that time I noticed the system would not boot in safe mode, I could not start System Restore, SFC /scannow fails, DISM scans do not work, 'Turn on/off Windows Components' is blank, I cannot rename folders without an error message, some websites do not work while others are fine in Firefox and Chrome, Thunderbird email no longer connects to anything although other applications network resources are perfectly normal. It all seems random.
Attempting Safe mode, is just an endless re-boot cycle. I have tried to DVD boot the machine for repair and that yields nothing. I also ran the usual command line suspects - BOOTREC , SFC, and DISM with no help or just an error.
BOOTREC appeared the be successful.
SFC /scannow: returns 'Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service'
DSIM /online [anything at all]: returns error 87 Option Unknown
CHKDSK returns clean
MEMTEST returns clean
PSU tests are all clean (I design power supplies so uniquely qualified and configured to test that part)
Virus/Malware full scans from 3 different vendors come back clean
Everytime I boot, it takes a while and repeats the same update messages. Maybe windows update has issues?
My guess is this is a combination of corrupt system files on top of getting an old registry. Not sure how I can scan/repair any of the system files without the usual MS utilities working. Totally unsure how to find what may be a huge pile of registry problems either. Maybe it is virus/malware that is not detected? First time I have dealt with a workstation that boots in normal mode, but fails in any form of safe mode.
Hoping (on my knees begging) for any wisdom.