I had to recover a W10 box from a family members work after windows had slowly given itself cancer of file corruption. I’ve dealt with this shit before and it’s not a big deal… usually…

This fucker took 3 days of babysitting to bring back to life. In-place upgrades, it required multiple (why, no fucking idea), dism, sfc just chipping away bit by bit. And no, this is a work machine, so wipe and start fresh was reserved for actual “cannot be saved” situations. It has a backup plan, and I am the unofficial/unpaid IT guy for that location, but I don’t have license keys or installers for the software used (inherited situation), and it would add lots of friction to get running again. Absolutely not jumping on that grenade unless I must, it’s untested if a restore causes license validation errors (time checks and other bullshit).

After that fiasco I applied a universal scheded task of dism followed by sfc, on a monthly basis, and every six months a few automated checks but also I pop my head in for a minute (remotely) just to validate that those automated tasks are running successfully.

It’s been about… 4 years now? And it’s been working as-expected. But windows obliterating itself with no user input isn’t what I’d call ‘a thing of the past’.

(also it wasn’t a hardware fault)