Cannot boot windows 10, “bootrec /fixboot” gives “access denied”

My “always on” home desktop today appeared to be totally unresponsive. It was clear that I had only one choice to power reset it. At first it seemed that it booted into my login screen, but again my I did power reset by mistake. From this point on I wasn’t able to boot. It shows “inaccessible boot device” blue screen.

Recovery or restore doesn’t work. From cmd prompt I see my C:\ drive and all files seem to be ok, entire chkdsk shows that everything is ok with the drive.

bootrec /FixMbr works, however bootrec /fixboot gives me “access is denied.”

bootrec /scanos and bootrec /rebuildbcd both show “Total identified windows installations: 0”

I tried to run it all from the UEFI partition by enabling it from diskpart but I still get “access denied” for fixboot, no matter what I tried. There is one suggestion for the “access denied” error: to format the UEFI partition and then manually create EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ in there and retry bootrec /fixboot but I find it outlandish to even consider it.

Any suggestions? What could be wrong?

I ran into the same issue, the suggestion from Darko_65 in Microsoft Answers forum is what worked for me:

"bootrec" command sometimes has problems finding proper boot device and windows installation to fix.

Use "bcdboot" command to fix boot (bcdboot requires that partitions are specified explicitly!)

bcdboot C:\windows /s S:

specifies C: as Windows partition, S: as system partition.

Use "diskpart" or "mountvol" commands to map system partition.

In the answer given by @aoetalks, copying the BCD files to new mount point didnt worked for me. It always ended up saying source files not found. It could be because my /EFI directory got corrupted.

Anyways, trying to boot with a Windows 8.1 USB media worked. All the commands, bootrec /fixmbr, /fixboot, /scanos, and /rebuildbcd worked fine and I'm back to my desktop in a few minutes.

It looks like the Windows 10 bootrec has some issues.