Windows 10 and FSX: a promising startup ended up in a nightmare...

[Eziocin 46]

I have recently decided to move to Windows 10. I have plenty of drive bays in my case, so I dedicated two SSDs (one for the OS and one for FSX/P3D) for a "Windows 10 system". I left untouched on two other separate drives the Windows 7 system on which I am currently running FSX-SE.

I made a fresh install (updated first, then wiped everything out and made a fresh install)...everything went smoothly...love at first sight...very fast and eye candy system....and when I had FSX with all my addons up and running and made my first flight in the new system I was delighted by how smooth FSX was. 

It took a few days for the honeymoon to finish.....the first problem to appear was the infamous Start menu issue that seems to have affected several users: start menu not working and several icons on the desktop not working unless "run as administrator"... I tried a few solutions found on the web but none of them fixed the issue. I eventually found out that creating a new user account and logging on this account would solve the problem...

Very good....it took me some time to have everything again up and running but at the end everything returned normal.

A few days later I ran again into the same start menu problem.....quite annoyed I created a new user account again, but on the next startup I had a "chkdsk" warning ...I let the system run the "chkdsk" which took about a couple of hours to finish with several errors and replacing a huge number of file security IDs.

When chkdsk was completed I found that I could not log on Windows 10 any more....

I logged on the parallel Windows 7 system and I tried to access to the Win 10 drive to see if the files were damaged, but I received a message of unreadable (corrupted) disk...this was surprising as this is a brand new disk, so I tried to make a fresh installation of Windows 7 on that disk, and..guess what ?....it worked very well and it has been now up and running with no issues whatsoever for some days.

My PC hardware components are ok, as my "parallel" FSX/Win7 system is working pretty well even for continuous hours on overclocking (I7-2600k @4.8Ghz) so I have no reason to believe it may be a hardware failure.

SSD failure ? I don't think so as it is now working well...I have also tried some SSD status software to check the health of the disks and all of them seem quite healthy.

What else to point fingers at ? 

I would love to keep Windows 10 but unless I find an explanation for what happened and I have the confidence that Microsoft has found a solution for start menu bug I am not going to make a full reinstall.....I have enough of OS install in the last few weeks...  :smile:

Any useful suggestion would be mere than appreciated..

 

Regards

 

Ezio

[RaptyrOne 1,405]

Hey Ezio, sorry for your frustration. I don't think this is a Windows issue, more a system compatibility or circumstance issue. I say this because there are many thousands of happy Windows 10 converts including me. So, to try and fix your problem, how are you installing Windows 10. Did you install W7 and then do the upgrade over it? If you have done that and your PC was registered with MS then go for a proper clean install. Upgrading over an "old" OS is not ideal.

 

Download the W10 install package ISO from Microsoft website to a USB and then format the drive using the installer, deleting and recreating partitions. Make sure you back up everything beforehand. This is the only way to clean instal W10 unless you purchased a MS W10 DVD.

 

Unfortunately the recently released 'November update' is not yet on the ISO download but if you wait it out a few more days it should become available, so you can download the very latest version of it.

 

Then once W10 is installed, before adding any programs, run Comand Prompt as Administrator and type in sfc/scannow and hit enter. Check the the scan reports no issues before going ahead and installing programs.

[Eziocin 46]

Greg,

this is weird....the disk(s) are OK...I ran sfc/scannow and they passed OK. The point is not the hardware...it must be a compatibility issue of some sort or something I am doing wrong during install.

It cannot be a hardware issue as the disk runs ok with Win 7 and becomes corrupted after a few hours on Win 10.....and this happened on three different SSD....!

I noticed that during all the Win 10 installations I have done in the last few weeks I have never installed the Intel Chipset drivers. I realized it tonight looking at the device manager. I don't know if this may be a cause for my problems....another think I am looking at is CCleaner : I have used also the registry cleaner feature and my problems have started shortly after it....quite frankly I don't know where to look at....I am not a PC novice but this is driving me crazy....

Regards