One of the Win10 computers in my office failed to boot yesterday, so I went in to work on it.

During boot it got to a screen that offered two options: Restart PC, and Advanced Options with a bunch of recovery options.  None of the tools were able to run.
I also used Dell diagnostics, which didn't find any problems with the hardware or drive partitions.

It took me about an hour, but I was finally able to restore the drive to a 'Last Known Good' state, and get it to boot normally.

I ran SFC /scannow which found and fixed some corrupted files.  So it looks like somehow some Windows system files got messed up.
I also optimized the drive, which hadn't run for 32 days (it's on a weekly schedule.) I ran CHKDSK on a reboot, which just did whatever it does.

I noticed that the C: drive icon in 'My PC' has a yellow triangle with an exclamation point. My understanding is that this could be caused by a lot of different things, one of which is that BitLocker is not running.
I don't enable BitLocker on any of our PC's, and I haven't seen that icon appear on any of the others.

Would it be wise to clone that drive to a new NVMe drive and replace it?
The computer is only about a year old.

It would be wise to create a copy of the drive anyways, especially if you got it to boot.

Take a look at the windows event monitor and look for critical errors in the Windows branch. This can get you an idea of what you're working with.

It may be as simple as fixing some of the registry errors. Or it may be failing hardware. Hard to tell you from here.

Also, you can go to System Information and click on "Problem Devices" or Windows Error Reporting and see what you can find there.

Will do.  Thanks for the advice.

I do have a full backup of that drive on a SAN.  I can do a bare metal restore if needed.

Excellent. You should be fine to tinker.

Hit the windows key and type Memory Check Diagnostic. my bad.

It's a built in program. It'll take some time, but it goes sector by sector and verifies memory integrity.

Also, if youre comfortable with it, open a Command prompt as an administrator and type "wmic diskdrive get status"

Check for status there. You can also use windows SMART by typing "wmic diskdrive get model,status".

Last cmd, you can run "chkdsk /f /r C:" or replace C: with whatever drive letter you use. that will scan the whole disk for errors as well. Its a little more robust in CMD than the utility.

Sounds like a failing ssd.  Went through that in January.

SFC and it finds corrupt files and other issues,
you should then run DISM to fix the Component Store
and then run SFC again to fix any broken files


things can get wonky - semi-broken from powering off
the machine the wrong way.  System patches that sort
of work, but fail.

SSDs are getting cheap. Wouldn't cost much to replace.

I wonder what Crystal Disk Info  says about the health.

Use the standard edition if you don' t want the extra "flair".  

Lots of great advice here.
Thank you all.

An unexpected voltage state could corrupt files.  This doesn't affect the media, just the state in which it was written.  I wouldn't worry about drive life.  

My cousin would always run her laptop battery down, and my guess is that crashed her system.  She was ready for a newer model, she gave it to me and I installed Ubuntu on it.  It's been running solid since.