I just did the most cursed thing to my Windows install.
I wanted to move my boot drive from SATA to NVMe. Obviously just copy the raw bytes from one to the other, right? Nope, BSOD, INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. All the bootrec/bcdedit magic I could try did nothing to help. Makes no sense, why is this so hard.
(cont)
So I got a Win10 USB installer image and did an in-place install on my NVMe boot partition. It already had a Windows install, so the installer moved stuff to a Windows.old folder.
Let it go far enough to boot on the new install but didn't complete the setup. Then I copied back my C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, etc. on top of the new install.
Surprisingly, everything works. I'm very excited for the future technical debt I've just created for myself.
I discovered along the way that the Windows cmd.exe "move" command apparently cannot move hidden files. Not even "with the right flags", it's just unable to do so at all.
Workaround: C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\mv.exe. Yes, really, that works.
My start menu is fixed!
... by upgrading to Windows 11. I tried many other things, but couldn't get any potential fix to do anything. I suspect I broke some permission related things when moving folders from the Windows.old backup. It made MSIX / AppContainer / Windows Store things unhappy.
But now I can't notice any more issues? Woo.
@robryk maybe. I don't think so though, I expect this would have broken a lot more things. It's probably more subtle.