Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

quoyle84 · 2021-07-29 16:41

i have installed Q4OS windows install on my dell win 10 Pro laptop. everything runs great until i get a notification that i need to restart pc to repair drive errors. this is occurring due to a security and maintenance scan that windows periodically does. after restarting the pc and booting into windows, the repairs are done. afterwards i reboot to go back into Q4OS and get this message. "Boot chainload, phase 1 ...unmount: can't unmount /host1: Invalid argument Host filesystem not found, make Windows partition accessible. Press [Enter} to reboot ..._" i try to reboot into Q4OS and get the same message. i then reboot into windows and it is fine. repeated attempts to access Q4OS fail. i then unstall Q4OS and reinstall and it works fine until the next scan several days later where the issue is repeated. it seems that during the windows maintenance scan it is seeing the Q4OS install as a drive error and needs to repair it. in the process of repair it bricks my access to Q4OS. i looked through the forum but did not find a similar incident. apologies if i missed it. is there any workaround for this issue? i know i can go into registry on windows and disable the maintenance scans but i don't want to do that as there may be a time when i have an actual problem with a drive and it will be missed. thank you for your time...

Midas · 2021-07-30 12:42

I have no solution for your problem but I'm quite sure this is due to Windows messing your boot-up setup.

To offer possible solutions, we will need to know if this PC is using UEFI (most likely) or the legacy BIOS bootloader...

q4osteam · 2021-07-30 13:04

@quoyle84
That looks like the data integrity on your Windows disk has been corrupted somehow. Please check, if the Q4OS loop file exists and has a proper size. Navigate to the "C:\debian\disks\" directory, check its contents, especially "root.disk" and "swap.disk" file and post back here. Post also the information as @Midas requested above.

Did anyone else encounter similar issue ?

quoyle84 · 2021-07-30 14:06

Thank you for your replies.

i am pretty sure PC is using UEFI. i was trying to verify but cannot remember if there is a way to do this without rebooting into bios to check. i do not want to reboot right now as windows will execute the "repair" and i will lose access to Q4OS. i was hoping there might be a solution to apply before this would happen.
all contents seem to be present in C:\debian\disks\directory. root.disk = 22,265,856 kb, swap.dosk = 1,228,800 kb. please bear in mind that the windows "repair" has not been executed yet as i have not restarted since notice came up. it may be that these would change after the repair is made which could be a clue to what is going on.
i did notice that the boot folder in C:\debian\disks\directory has a grub folder in it and that is empty, but again this is before windows repairs the drive, maybe this is nnormal?
just to note: i have never seen the restart to repair drive notification appear on this laptop in all of the time i have had it. thus i am guessing that the Q4OS install is somehow related. the laptop is functioning fine otherwise.

Tolkem · 2021-07-30 14:27

Is secure boot enabled? If it is, try disabling it and see if that works. Read here to know how to do that without rebooting https://fossbytes.com/enable-disable-se … dows-8-10/

i am pretty sure PC is using UEFI. i was trying to verify but cannot remember if there is a way to do this without rebooting into bios to check.

Check this

Last edited by Tolkem (2021-07-30 14:30)

quoyle84 · 2021-07-30 15:12

thank you for the info
yes it is UEFI
yes it is secure boot
the article referenced still seems to require a reboot to change secure boot state which would initiate the drive repair anyway.
in light of this i will close all programs, perform a reboot to repair drive
i will then try to reboot Q4OS. if it fails i will boot into windows and check debian folder for changes and report back on that
then i will boot into bios and disable secure boot
then i wil try to get into Q4OS again
if this fails, then i will reinstall Q4OS
after successful install i will manually run a windows maintenance scan to see if the error pops up again

q4osteam · 2021-07-30 15:37

@quoyle84
We would appreciate, if you report back even on success, for us to get a feedback from an independent installation. Q4OS for Windows should work with secure boot on, however it may be worth trying to switch it temporarily off for testing out.

quoyle84 · 2021-07-30 15:46

ok i have rebooted and windows has repaired c drive.
i accessed C:\debian\disks\directory and found the root.disk to be gone
swap.disk is exactly as before
based on this i would assume Q4OS will not boot so i will not try.
so apparently the disk repair is deleting the root.disk for whatever reason.
my question is, will disabling secure boot prevent the maintenance scan from tagging the root.disk as an error?
another thought i had was to create another partition and install the Q4OS windows install in it. what i do not know, and have been trying to find out unsuccessfully is, when the maintenance scan runs, does it scan all drives or just C? i have a feeling it does all drives and thus making another partition would be useless as root.disk would again be tagged as an error.
any thoughts on all of this would be appreciated
thank you for all of your help thus far...

quoyle84 · 2021-07-30 21:32

ok, continuing with the detective work...i have answered my question about secure boot. disabling it has no effect on Q4OS not booting. it will boot fine with secure boot enabled or not.
so i reinstalled Q4OS windows install once again and it booted fine. i then ran a manual maintenance scan (in windows) and once again it said i had to reboot to repair errors on the drive.
i did the restart, the repair was implemented, and, after inspecting the debian folder, once again the root.disk is gone.
kinda frustrating that i know Q4OS is in there but i can't get at it. i basically would have to reinstall it about every four to five days as that must be the schedule of the automatic maintenance schedule.
if after reading this thread anyone has any ideas on what i can do please let me know. i would rather run this Q4OS install than windows as i am using around 50% less memory.
thank you for your support

Last edited by quoyle84 (2021-07-30 21:40)

q4osteam · 2021-07-31 08:34

quoyle84 wrote:

... ran a manual maintenance scan (in windows) and once again it said i had to reboot to repair errors on the drive.

How exactly did you run the maintenance scan in Windows ? We need this info to reproduce the issue as closely as possible and subsequently investigate and fix it.

quoyle84 · 2021-07-31 13:08

this is what i did to reproduce the automatic maintenance on my laptop...
while in windows 10 type windows key + s to get to search box and type in "security and maintenance". click on the security and maintenance result and it opens the security and maintenance app from the control panel. click on the maintenance drop down and under automatic maintenance you will see the windows shield next to "Start maintenance". click start maintenance and this will initiate the maintenance scan which may take a while to run.
in my experience, it says it detects a possible error on the drive and then will ask you to click on a button to scan the drive, which will take a long time also. eventually it gets to the point when it will say you need to reboot to repair the drive.
now i don't know if this will occur in your instance. if the initial scan comes up with no errors then it will not ask to scan drive, in which case you won't be able to reproduce the situation i am having.
i believe you can also accomplish this by this method which would be quicker. click windows key + E to enter file explorer. right click on C drive and click on properties. then click on tools tab and then click on the check button under error checking. i think this basically skips the system maintenance scan and just does the error scan.
the maintenance scan runs on a daily schedule in the background. i found that around four days after i had installed Q4OS i get the request to restart. this has happened every time after i reinstalled Q4OS (4 times now i believe)
thank you for your help and i hope this helps. good luck in trying to reproduce this issue. i have not been able to find anything quite like it on the forum yet.

i also have successfully installed the Q4OS windows install on an old netbook that i have windows 10. even though it is a 32bit system the install worked because i think the processor is rated as 64 bit ready. i have not had this issues occur on that pc yet, but i don't use it every day like my dell laptop. maybe i will run a maintenance scan on that to see if this issue occurs on the netbook also...

q4osteam · 2021-07-31 13:56

Thanks for the detailed info, we will post back here as soon as a new info appears.

quoyle84 wrote:

i also have successfully installed the Q4OS windows install on an old netbook that i have windows 10 ... maybe i will run a maintenance scan on that to see if this issue occurs on the netbook also...

Yes please do so and post back a result here, if possible.

Tolkem · 2021-07-31 14:05

quoyle84 wrote:

thank you for the info
ok, continuing with the detective work...i have answered my question about secure boot. disabling it has no effect on Q4OS not booting. it will boot fine with secure boot enabled or not.

Ok, I meant disabling secure boot to see if that's what makes the maintenance scan see Q4OS as an error, thus deleting root.disk. Did you try that?

quoyle84 · 2021-07-31 14:19

yes that is what i did. secure boot was disabled when i made the scan and it still found the error. so it seems that secure boot is not involved with what is going on...

quoyle84 · 2021-07-31 14:21

in reference to the netbook. i am rebooting it now from a windows update and will run an error check on the C drive to see if the issue appears. this may take a while as the net book has only 2 gb of ram and is slow. i will report back as soon as i know...

quoyle84 · 2021-07-31 15:05

netbook was scanned for errors but there were none. i noticed that the netbook is legacy boot, that probably doesn't make any difference for the issue...

quoyle84 · 2021-08-01 21:20

just to be sure, i ran a complete maintenance scan on my netbook and it came up with no issues even though Q4OS is installed. the only difference i see thus far between the netbook and my dell laptop is that dell is 64 bit and UEFI boot and netbook is 32 bit and legacy boot. i have been researching, with no luck thus far, to see if only the C drive is scanned during the maintenance scan. if that is true, then i could make another partition and install Q4OS on that and all should be fine, unless i would manually scan that partition. if anyone has any info or thoughts on this let me know. thanks...

q4osteam · 2021-08-02 09:58

We are working on a fix, we assume a new loop image will be released in a couple of weeks, so the issue may be fixed, however we are not sure of nature of the issue at the moment.
Thanks for the detailed helpful reporting, you are welcome to report any new findings and changes for this issue.

quoyle84 · 2021-08-02 13:46

i have conducted some tests over the weekend, this may help with discovering the issue.

first test on dell laptop with windows 10 pro. i installed q4oswinsetup. booted and ran fine. rebooted into windows and manually ran maintenance scan. errors were found and a requested drive scan was done. after scan restart was requested to repair the drive. restart to repair was initiated. after repair was done, i tried to boot into q4os and failed. checked debian folder on windows and found root.disk gone.

*** after maintenance scan runs, it shows that possible errors where found and a drive scan was needed. you have to click a different button to start that. before i did that i thought maybe i could copy the root.disk file to an external hard drive and then try to put it back if it was deleted due to drive scan and restart. i was not able to copy the root.disk file as a popup said that the file was corrupted. this was after the maintenance scan but before the drive scan. so one wonders if the maintenance scan is somehow corrupting the file.

second test was on a gateway netbook with windows 10 home on it. i did exactly the same as above with exactly the same results, except that i did not try to copy the root.disk file.

thus it seems from both of these tests is that regardless of computer brand or OS (home or pro) this issue occurs. it seems that the problem
is caused when maintenance scan runs. for some reason maintenance scan is finding errors in the q4os setup. the maintenance scan runs daily so it os inevitable that at some point the q4os install will get bricked. the only thing i found to prevent this from happening is to edit the registry to stop the maintenance from occurring automatically. this is not recommended as several functions are involved in the maintenance activity such as updates security etc. even with the registry edited to stop the auto maintenance, the danger still exists because at any point that one would need to run a drive scan (chkdisk) the q4os setup would be rendered useless. the only other possible option is to install q4oswinsetup on another partition. this would only be useful if the maintenance scan only scans C drive thus not seeing q4os on another partition. but yet again the danger still exists if one need to scan the partition for whatever reason. so these are basically workarounds and not solutions.

here is how i do the maintenance scan (as noted previously) to help you reproduce the problem...
type maintenance in search box on windows 10
click on security and maintenance result
once in the security and maintenance app, click dropdown on maintenance and click on start maintenance button
after maintenance scan has completed there should be a notification that possible errors were found and a drive scan is recommended
click the drive scan button located below the notification
after drive scan is complete a notification should appear saying to restart pc so that repairs can be made
restart pc and after this check debian folder on C drive. root.disk should be gone and possibly replaced with some other letters which i forgot to note down.

thank you for your help

q4osteam · 2021-08-02 15:19

What disk size did you choose for Q4OS ?

q4osteam · 2021-08-02 16:09

We are now able to reproduce the issue on certain hardware, nonetheless we need to find out the nature of the issue. We would need to simplify the procedure to reproduce. So, are you able to reliably reproduce the issue via following steps:
- Install Q4OS, choose 20GB disk size
- Reboot to Q4OS
- Login and reboot back to Windows as soon as possible
- Do NOT run maintenance scan
- Run the C:\ drive integrity check from File Explorer > Properties > Tools
Does the drive check remove "root.disk" ?

quoyle84 · 2021-08-02 16:09

i believe it was 21gb for the netbook and 22gb for the laptop. whatever the default sizes that came up for each installation is what i used

quoyle84 · 2021-08-02 16:18

yes i have done the drive check method (i think i noted that above somewhere). for me the drive check removed the root.disk. my exact thinking was to save time by clicking on properties and running the disc scan without going through the maintenance scan. however, as mentioned above, i'm wondering if there is something going on during the maintenance scan due to the fact that when i tried to copy root.disk after maintenance scan i was told i could not because file was corrupted. how does a file get corrupted by a scan? so in short, maintenance finds "possible errors" and drive check initiated afterwards must confirm errors and then request the repair.

quoyle84 · 2021-08-02 22:48

out of curiosity i reinstalled q4oswinsetup again, booted into q4os and then back to windows to run a drive check on C. i noticed there was a details button so i clicked on that and got into the event viewer. this is what i found (maybe you already have this info but i thought i would pass it on in case you do not)

Log Name: Application
Source: Chkdsk
Date: 8/2/2021 5:35:22 PM
Event ID: 26226
Task Category: None
Level: Information
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: DESKTOP-KVSNM4A
Description:
Chkdsk was executed in scan mode on a volume snapshot.

Checking file system on C:
Volume label is OS.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
The allocated length 0x100001000 is not in multiple of 0x10000 for attribute
of type 0x80 and instance tag 0x0.
Found corrupt basic file structure for "\debian\disks\root.disk <0x2f,0x5ce6c>"
was not able to send command for self-healing due to lack of memory.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
The total allocated size 0x100001000 of attribute of type 0x80 and instance
tag 0x0 in file 0x5ce6c is incorrect. The expected value is 16dd01000.
Correcting total allocated size in attribute record (80, "")
of file 2F00000005CE6C.
"chkdsk /scan" is aborting due to self-healing command failure: 0xc0000102
"chkdsk /f" will be required to repair the volume.

Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Chkdsk" />
<EventID Qualifiers="0">26226</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>4</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2021-08-02T21:35:22.0021355Z" />
<EventRecordID>114196</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
<Channel>Application</Channel>
<Computer>DESKTOP-KVSNM4A</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data>

Checking file system on C:
Volume label is OS.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
The allocated length 0x100001000 is not in multiple of 0x10000 for attribute
of type 0x80 and instance tag 0x0.
Found corrupt basic file structure for "\debian\disks\root.disk <0x2f,0x5ce6c>"
was not able to send command for self-healing due to lack of memory.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
The total allocated size 0x100001000 of attribute of type 0x80 and instance
tag 0x0 in file 0x5ce6c is incorrect. The expected value is 16dd01000.
Correcting total allocated size in attribute record (80, "")
of file 2F00000005CE6C.
"chkdsk /scan" is aborting due to self-healing command failure: 0xc0000102
"chkdsk /f" will be required to repair the volume.
</Data>
<Binary>0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000</Binary>
</EventData>
</Event>

Tolkem · 2021-08-03 00:51

Can you post a screenshot of your disk? I mean, go to control panel > administrative tools > disk manager(wording might be different, my system's Spanish), take a screenshot, and attach it here? You can upload the screenshot to https://postimages.org/ then click on the share icon, you'll get some options, choose the one that reads hotlink for forums remove the last url part and the postimages link at the beginning so the image is displayed, like this:

Q4OS Forum

#1 2021-07-29 16:41

Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#2 2021-07-30 12:42

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#3 2021-07-30 13:04

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#4 2021-07-30 14:06

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#5 2021-07-30 14:27

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#6 2021-07-30 15:12

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#7 2021-07-30 15:37

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#8 2021-07-30 15:46

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#9 2021-07-30 21:32

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#10 2021-07-31 08:34

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#11 2021-07-31 13:08

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#12 2021-07-31 13:56

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#13 2021-07-31 14:05

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#14 2021-07-31 14:19

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#15 2021-07-31 14:21

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#16 2021-07-31 15:05

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#17 2021-08-01 21:20

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#18 2021-08-02 09:58

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#19 2021-08-02 13:46

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#20 2021-08-02 15:19

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#21 2021-08-02 16:09

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#22 2021-08-02 16:09

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#23 2021-08-02 16:18

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#24 2021-08-02 22:48

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

#25 2021-08-03 00:51

Re: Q4OS Windows install not booting after restart in windows

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