Easily fix broken Windows files now with System File Checker

today I'm going to show you how to repair Windows system files without reloading Windows this is the video that many computer techs don't want you to see in fact if you're one of my customers turn this video off right now you don't want to see this stay tuned [Music] you know what there's a problem in the computer industry that drives me absolutely crazy I've talked about this in other videos and that's why I think I'm going to do a series of videos on this topic in the computer industry we have something called nuke and pavetex these are typically technicians that are new to the industry and don't know how to fix a broken windows install so their first go-to is to just wipe the system and reload Windows unfortunately this causes a lot of problems for customers because it it's rarely necessary and what's worse is I can't even count the amount of times that this has been done to one of my customers at a big box store and their data being not being backed up beforehand you remember that little piece of paper that you signed when you dropped your computer off typically with your signature that paper takes away all liability from the company of your data so they really don't care about your data but you know Windows is an incredibly repairable operating system you you know I have in the past often criticized Microsoft for some of the decisions that they make in fact the videos where I criticize Microsoft are some of the most popular videos I have on this channel however one thing that they really do well is give us an incredible amount of tools and procedures that can be used to fix a broken copy of Windows So today we're looking at the system file Checker command and no way before you click off this video I'm going to cover the proper way to use the system file Checker I'm not just going to tell you to run sfc scan now and be done with it like you see on most internet forums and that's because FSC almost never works on a broken system for a variety of different reasons most of those reasons can be dealt with pretty easily and that's what we're going to be talking about today in this video but before we do that we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under 20 dollars stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video okay so the system file Checker tool or sfc is a tool that simply checks the Integrity of Windows system files and if it finds any corrupted files it replaces them with non-corrupted versions sfc is able to do this because Windows keeps a cached copy of all of its system files that it calls the system image the reason why sfc almost always fails by itself is because the system image isn't always up to date and in some cases the cached copies of Windows system files could be corrupted themselves let's say you loaded Windows 10 with version 1909 you've been using the system for several years and installing build updates as they come out if your windows image has cache system files the date all the way back to 1909 then sfc can't use those system files for build 22 H2 so it will throw up an error like this saying that Windows resource protection found corrupted files but was unable to fix some of them now you could dig through the sfc logs and try to figure out which system files sfc determined were corrupted and try to replace those files manually with the correct versions for your specific build of Windows however there's a way easier way that's by using dism which stands for the deployment image servicing and management tool this is another tool that Microsoft includes in Windows which will check those cache system files to determine if they are corrupted or if they're the proper version for your build windows and if it finds problems it will fix those system files and cache the new ones so that FSC can run successfully so now that I've explained to you what these tools do let me show you how they work in action let's do it okay so we're here in Windows and what you'll see on most forums is someone just telling you to run sfc scan now and to do that you just click on start you type CMD you make sure to run it as administrator you have to say yes to the user account control but once you do that you get your command prompt open and you just run sfc space forward slash scan now and hit enter and it'll go through the process of scanning your system files and this will take a while to complete but once it completes it almost always fails in fact in my experience I would say it fails 95 of the time and the reason why it fails is because chances are your system file cache is just out of date and you have to update your system image before sfc can properly replace those corrupted files that it found and to do that let's get back on the computer and I'll show you how okay so as you can see right here it says Windows resource protection did not find any Integrity violations and that's because I ran FSC several times when I Was preparing for this video and writing notes and things like that so sfc has this install of Windows solid right now but if yours doesn't if yours gives you this error here then let me show you what to do all you do is just type dism space forward slash online and online just means it's the operating system that's currently running it doesn't mean you're on the internet the next thing you want to do is hit forward slash clean up Dash image base again and there's a couple different switches you can use here if you just want to check the system image you can do forward slash check health and from there all it's going to do is check to see if the system image has any problems and you can also if you want to if you hit enter on this one it does a really quick check but if you want a more thorough check to check to see if the system image is good you can run instead of check Health what you would run is scan health and by doing that it goes through the process of doing a real scan to check if the system file cache is up to date and that there's nothing corrupted and this one's going to take a little bit longer than the last one because it goes a lot deeper okay so right there it said it didn't find any corruption and if that's the case you can just move on and run sfc scan now but if it does find something corrupted then what you would do is instead of scan Health what you want to do is you want to type restore health and by typing restore Health it'll go through the process of doing the original scan that it did but if it finds any problems it will fix those problems rather than just scanning them and letting you know what's wrong and in all reality at this stage right here you could probably skip all the other switches that I showed you and just do restore health because ultimately that's what you want to do anyway there really isn't many reasons to scan it without fixing the problems so let's move on and I'll show you the next step if for whatever reason you run into errors at this point there's one more step that you should take and that's actually a really important one if dism for whatever reason can't fix the system file image you might have to actually tell it where your Source image is and for that there's a really easy way to do it and all you do is open up your browser and then search for the media creation tool and then you're going to want it for whatever version of Windows you have in this case we're doing windows 10. so go ahead and go there click on right here on Microsoft site download Windows 10 disk image and then from there you're going to scroll down where it says create Windows 10 install media so go ahead and hit download now and it's going to download the media creation tool and from there go ahead and run it you have to click yes to the user account control and then from there go ahead and close our browser now and it's going to go through and it's going to get a few things ready this might take a little bit of time so just be patient okay once we're at this stage all you got to do is go ahead and hit accept and then wait for it to get more things ready you're going to spend a lot of time waiting for things to get ready in this process so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit here okay once you get to this stage you don't want to upgrade this PC now that's a waste of time what you want to do is you want to create the install media so go ahead and click on the second one and hit next and then go ahead and you can leave all this default here and hit next and then I'm going to go ISO file right here but you can also use a USB drive I'm going to use the ISO file right now and then you hit next and it's going to ask you where to download this ISO file at and it's perfectly fine doing it on your desktop I actually have mine sitting inside of the downloads folder and I've already done that so I'm going to skip this step right here so once you do that it's going to go ahead and go through the process of downloading the iso and creating it for you and once you do that that's all you need to do I'm going to go ahead and close this right now because I've already done that so we're going to go ahead and hit yes and it's going to clean things up so on mine if you go into the downloads folder here's the windows ISO image that we downloaded and all you have to do is double click it and it'll go ahead and mount it if you go to this PC you'll see that it's mounted into a virtual drive and it's on the D drive and what we're looking for is if you go into the sources folder you're going to look for this file right here it's the install ESD now yours might be installed Wim and if it is that's fine both will work but mine's the ESD you just have to check to see which one you have before we go on to the next step and to do that all we do is you go into your command prompt if you push the up key it will give you the last command you ran so that's what we're doing right here and you want a space after it you want to hit forward slash and type in source and then you want to use a colon and then from there we want to give it the path to this file right here this install ESD so this is the path right here D forward slash sources so from there all we have to type in is D colon backslash sources backslash install dot ESD and then from there once we hit enter it's going to go through the same process but it's going to use the image from that ISO file that you just downloaded in its process of checking the system file images so I'm going to skip ahead real quick until this is done I'm going to show you one more switch that you can use on this okay so dism will sometimes use the image file that you specified but it will also use Windows update and if that happens and you want to limit its access to Windows update there's one more switch you can use so we'll go back to the command prompt here and for whatever reason you might have different reasons for wanting to do this maybe you don't have internet access and you don't even want it to try to access Windows update and if that's the case that's fine so what we're going to do is we're going to hit up Arrow again to get the last command that we ran we're going to hit space we're going to do another forward slash and then we're going to type Limited access and by typing that what it's going to do is it's going to error out because clearly I spelled it wrong so we're going to hit the up Arrow again and right here here's what I did wrong I typed limited it's not limited I'm sorry it's limit access okay so my bad so we type limit access we hit enter and it goes through the process but in this case it's not going to use Windows update it's only going to use this image file that we have right here in this ISO and it's probably going to take about the same amount of time but for whatever reason if you want to limit its access to the internet and Windows update then that's how you do it okay so at this point you should be able to run sfc scan now and it should work fine I used to always get frustrated whenever I was trying to find a solution to a problem in Windows and someone would suggest to just run sfc scan now because it literally never fixed anything that was until I found how to use dism if you want sfc to work you have to give it uncorrupted current versions of your system files then it does its job exactly how it's supposed to by using these two commands in combination like I've shown you in this video it will fix most issues that many people would just throw their hands up and reload Windows in fact while doing research for this video the system here that I'm using actually has three hard drives on it one is just for gaming and I have another one that's for video editing the last one is just a temporary drive that I use to install Windows for videos just like this in fact that's what's running on it right now for the longest time I've been having excessive hard drive usage issues on this gaming install that I have in this system but running sfc scan now solved the problem so like I said before it's almost never necessary to reload a modern version of Windows I mean it's got to be really messed up for me to even consider reloading windows so you know this is not going to be the only video on this topic that I'm gonna do I'm gonna go through many more videos on how to save a damaged copy of Windows and I'm also going to create a new playlist specifically dedicated to repairing windows so if there's any other issues on this topic that you'd like me to cover then please mention them in the comments below and I might make a video on it but if you like videos like this then check out this one where I show you how to re-enable the automatic registry backups that Microsoft stupidly disabled for some reason this is a feature that you will hopefully never need but you really should turn it back on anyway as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 550,330

Keywords: sfc /scannow, system file checker, fix windows 10, fix windows 11, fixing broken windows system files, windows 10, Dont reload windows, dism, Microsoft Windows Deployment Image Servicing and Management

Id: acxCueZ2dVQ

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023