if·reboot

Summary

A bootable WinPE technician appliance for Windows machines that won't start. It boots from USB, reads the actual boot chain rather than guessing at it, and offers repairs that are gated behind a confirmation and a backup.

Alongside the repairs: per-drive SMART health, BitLocker recovery-key lookup, and remote assistance over an encrypted relay so a second technician can see the same screen. When it cannot determine something it says Unknown, and a drive it cannot read is Unavailable, never "healthy" by default.

Build process

.NET 10 · WPF: The whole appliance is one self-contained app that runs as the WinPE shell, winpeshl.ini launches it instead of a desktop. Rendered in software, because WinPE has no GPU.
smartmontools: smartctl is bundled for ATA and NVMe health, cross-checked against the WMI failure-predict flag so one silent source can't produce a false pass.
bcdedit · SFC · DISM · chkdsk: The repair layer, scheme-aware for both UEFI/GPT and BIOS/MBR: recreate boot files, rebuild the BCD, offline SFC and DISM, fix the MBR, re-enable WinRE. Every write is backed up first and confirmed by the technician.
GDI capture over WSS: The remote agent streams the screen as JPEG dirty-rects, takes input via SendInput, syncs the clipboard and gates the terminal. Pairing is a word-pair host name plus a 12-character PIN, with a local kill-switch.
LDAP · on-prem AD: Looks up BitLocker recovery keys from Active Directory. Keys are shown in the session only, never written to the log or to disk.

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