Not a good morning when Windows 10 (20H2) decided not to boot up !
There were updates earlier which needed a restart of the OS but thereafter it misbehaved. It loops loading Windows and restarting.
First off, I try to boot up on the recovery and tried to restore from previous saved point. That didn't work and gave same issue. Then tried repairing boot record with series on commands on console ie. bootrec and still the same. Thereafter I created a Windows USB using the Windows Media Creation Tool and tried a repair of Windows. It didn't go far as it restarted at a point and did the same. Out of options, I head to my arsenal of Live USB drives and find the HBCD drive. Intention was to look into the local drive from the Live OS and save my files.
Upon opening the Windows Explorer and click on the local drive, it asks for my bitlocker key. After keying that in on the root folder, saw some folders starting with "$", which seems odd. Nothing to lose, chose all of them (was about 7) and deleted. Then I tried to restart the machine. This time Windows loaded !
Thanks you so much MICROSOFT !
Sidenote: HBCD or Hiren Boot CD is a Windows 10 Live USB and may be downloaded HERE
There are many other Live CD flavor you can use and create. One of the more common ones is YUMI - Multiboot USB Creator.
