Yeah, basically that. I’m back at work in Windows land on a Monday morning, and pondering what sadist at Microsoft included these features. It’s not hyperbole to say that the startup repair, and the troubleshooters in settings, have never fixed an issue I’ve encountered with Windows. Not even once. Is this typical?
ETA: I’ve learned from reading the responses that the Windows troubleshooters primarily look for missing or broken drivers, and sometimes fix things just by restarting a service, so they’re useful if you have troublesome hardware.
Sfc and DISM have each worked exactly once for me.
That’s because most people use them incorrectly. You need to run DISM first to repair the component store, but for that to work properly, you’ll need source files/wim that matches the same OS patch level as that of the machine you’re trying to fix. Once the component source is repaired properly, then run SFC, which would replace the corrupted system files from the now repaired component store.
If you ran SFC on its own, it may not do anything if the component store is corrupted, and if you ran DISM on its own, it won’t fix the actual issue. You need to run both, in the proper order, against matching source files.
Thanks! I just learned something new!