windows-ops

name	windows-ops
description	Comprehensive Windows workstation operations - diagnose slow boot, identify failing drives, decode BSOD crashes, manage startup apps, audit event logs. Use for: Windows is slow, slow bootup, won't boot, blue screen, BSOD, kernel crash, drive failing, SMART errors, disk errors, Event 41, Event 129, storahci reset, BugCheck, CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, crash dump, MEMORY.DMP, minidump, msconfig, services.msc, registry Run keys, StartupApproved, scheduled tasks at logon, slow login, high CPU at boot, Adobe startup, Docker startup, disable startup app, unexplained UAC prompt, what asked for admin, elevation prompt, prefetch forensics, BAM, process attribution, Security 4688.
license	MIT
allowed-tools	Read Write Bash
metadata	{"author":"claude-mods","related-skills":"net-ops, debug-ops, perf-ops"}

windows-ops

Helps with

Slow boot on a Windows machine that used to be fast — bloat accumulation across the five startup mechanisms (registry Run keys, services, scheduled tasks, startup folders, group policy). The same machine still boots fast once those are inventoried and trimmed.

Failing drives that nobody's spotted yet. The signal lives in System log Events 7 / 52 / 153 / 154 (disk bad block, paging error, retry, hardware error) and storahci Event 129 ("Reset to device, \Device\RaidPortN, was issued"). Healthy drives produce zero of these — hundreds in a month means active failure even when SMART still claims "Healthy."

Crashes with no obvious cause. Event 41 (Kernel-Power) carries the BugCheck code at Properties[0] and four parameters at Properties[1-4]. A 0xEF (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED), 0xD1 (DRIVER_IRQL), 0x124 (WHEA uncorrectable), or 0x0 (no bugcheck recorded → hard power loss) each implies a completely different fix.

"My PC is slow" diagnosed by chasing the wrong symptom. Task Manager shows what's running NOW; the System log shows what failed at boot, what's been crashing, and what storage events preceded each crash. Always audit before treating.

Unable to disable an HKLM startup entry because the user isn't an Administrator. The StartupApproved registry mechanism — what Task Manager's "Disable" button actually does — flips one byte in HKCU\...\Explorer\StartupApproved\Run and works without elevation, even for HKLM entries.

BSOD analysis without a dump file. Pagefile too small, or hard power loss skipped the dump-write. CrashDumpEnabled registry key + pagefile size + free space on system drive determine whether the next crash gets diagnosed at all.

Pre-crash timeline correlation. The events in the 10 minutes BEFORE Event 41 are where the story is. storahci resets before a crash → storage failure cascade. nvlddmkm / igdkmd64 warnings before crash → GPU driver hang. WHEA events before crash → hardware fault.

Identifying which physical drive is failing when the symptom is "Disk 1" or "\Device\Harddisk1" in an event message. Maps physical disk number ↔ drive letter ↔ controller port ↔ model + firmware, so the user knows which SATA cable to unplug.

Adobe Creative Cloud / Docker Desktop / Slack / Electron app bloat eating boot time. Each ships with multiple startup entries (registry + services + scheduled tasks) that all need disabling to fully stop the auto-launch.

"Is it safe to physically disconnect drive X?" — finding every system mechanism that references a drive letter before pulling the cable. Pagefile location, Windows Search index, scheduled tasks, services, user-profile junctions / symlinks, startup folder shortcuts, registry Run keys, and volume mount points. The wrong answer destroys uptime; the right answer is a one-line verdict.

Cloning data off a failing drive without finishing it off. robocopy /R:0 /W:0 (no retries) avoids the "every retry on a bad sector kills the drive faster" trap. For severely damaged drives, ddrescue with a resumable map file is the next tier. NEVER chkdsk /f a failing drive — repair operations write to bad sectors and accelerate failure.

Recovery from no-boot scenarios — boot configuration data (BCD) repair via bootrec, UEFI bootloader rebuild via bcdboot, Safe Mode access from a failing system, System Restore from Windows RE, and the boot-sequence triage layers (POST → boot device → boot driver → service load → shell).

Remote Windows diagnostics across the network. PowerShell remoting via WS-Man (the default WinRM transport) or SSH (modern alternative on Win10 1809+). Authentication for in-domain (Kerberos), workgroup (NTLM via TrustedHosts), and cross-OS (SSH key) scenarios. The double-hop problem and CredSSP. Running this skill's diagnostic scripts against a remote box by staging the skill folder via Copy-Item -ToSession.

Unexplained UAC prompts attributed to their caller. A declined elevation still executes the requesting binary unelevated, so Prefetch run times (PECmd), BAM last-execution FILETIMEs, the npx _npx cache, and Security 4688 (if auditing is on) identify exactly what asked for admin and when — see references/uac-attribution.md for the playbook and the one-elevated-pass forensic ladder.

Boot duration measurement and slow-startup-component identification. The Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational log (admin-only) records per-boot timing — BootMainPathTime, BootPostBootTime, total, and degradation flag — plus calls out specific apps, drivers, or services that exceeded the system's fast-boot threshold. Without admin, kernel-event fallback gives coarser but still useful timing.

The Universal Insight

Windows tells you what's wrong if you ask the right log in the right way. Most users (and most tutorials) reach for Task Manager. The actual diagnostic signal lives in the Event Log, the Registry's StartupApproved key, the storage driver's reset events, and the kernel's bugcheck records. This skill packages the queries that turn noise into a verdict.

The most common diagnostic failure: treating symptoms in isolation. "Slow boot" → disable startup apps. "BSOD" → reinstall drivers. "Random crashes" → memtest. These are reasonable last resorts, but the data to identify the actual cause is sitting in the System log untouched. Always audit before treating.

The Diagnostic Ladder

Walk down the layers in order. Each rung has a binary outcome:

1. Hardware errors    — WHEA-Logger events (CPU/RAM/PCIe-level faults)
2. Storage health     — disk events 7/52/153/154, storahci 129 (controller reset)
3. Crash record       — Event 41 (Kernel-Power) + BugCheck code + dump files
4. Pre-crash timeline — events in N minutes before each crash
5. Boot inventory     — all 5 startup mechanisms (registry, services, tasks, folders, group policy)
6. Resource pressure  — top CPU/RAM/IO consumers
7. Verdict            — what's failing, what to do

The most interesting failures cluster at rung 2 (storage) and rung 5 (startup bloat). The least interesting (but most-treated) is rung 6.

Workflow

1. Run the comprehensive audit

scripts/health-audit.ps1

Produces a verdict block: hardware errors, storage health per disk, recent crashes, top resource consumers, startup inventory. Scan for [FAIL] markers — that's where to drill.

2. Drill into the failing layer

Symptom	Script
Storage errors flagged	scripts/disk-health.ps1 -DiskNumber N (or -DriveLetter X or -Model 'HGST') — focused per-drive deep dive: SMART, all event IDs, controller resets attributable to the drive, verdict
Recent crash	scripts/crash-triage.ps1 -CrashTime <datetime> (or omit for most recent) — pre-crash timeline + BugCheck decode with smoking-gun detection
"Is it safe to disconnect drive X?"	scripts/drive-dependencies.ps1 -DriveLetter X — finds pagefile, search index, scheduled tasks, services, symlinks, startup shortcuts, run-key refs pointing at drive
"Why is boot taking so long?"	scripts/boot-perf.ps1 — per-boot durations from Diagnostics-Performance log (admin) or kernel-event fallback (non-admin), with slow-component flags

3. Apply the minimum reversible fix

Action	Script
Disable startup app — Run keys (HKCU + HKLM + WOW64)	scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 -Name <pattern> (no admin needed; supports wildcards)
Disable startup folder shortcut	scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 -Name '*.lnk' (covered by same script via StartupFolder variant)
List current state of all startup entries	scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 -List
Re-enable previously disabled	scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 -Name <pattern> -Enable
Set service to Manual (admin)	Set-Service <name> -StartupType Manual; Stop-Service <name>
Disable scheduled task	Disable-ScheduledTask -TaskName <name>
Safe clone from failing drive	scripts/recover-clone.ps1 -Source <path> -Destination <path> — robocopy with /R:0 to avoid pounding bad sectors

All disables are reversible — the StartupApproved registry mechanism flips one byte; re-enabling is the inverse.

Storage Health & Failure Detection

The single highest-yield audit. Failing drives cause slow boots (Windows times out probing them), instability (controller resets cascade into kernel hangs), and crashes (I/O failures kill critical processes). Three independent data sources to cross-reference:

Disk error events

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; ProviderName='disk'; StartTime=(Get-Date).AddDays(-30)} |
    Group-Object Id | Select-Object Count, Name

Event ID catalog (full reference in references/storage-events.md):

ID	Meaning	Severity
7	"The device, \Device\HarddiskN\DR1, has a bad block"	High — sectors going bad
51	"An error was detected on device during a paging operation"	High
52	"Write cache enabled"	Informational
153	"IO operation at LBA X was retried"	Medium
154	"IO operation at LBA X failed due to a hardware error"	High — Windows' explicit hardware verdict

Even 10 events of ID 7 or 154 in a month is a strong failure signal. Hundreds = drive replacement is urgent.

Storage controller resets

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; ProviderName='storahci'; Id=129; StartTime=(Get-Date).AddDays(-60)}

storahci Event 129 ("Reset to device, \Device\RaidPortN, was issued") means the drive stopped responding and the driver had to reset the controller. Healthy = zero events. Any non-zero count warrants investigation. >5 in a month = active failure.

Disk → drive letter mapping

The error message identifies \Device\HarddiskN — to find the actual drive:

Get-Disk | Select-Object Number, FriendlyName, BusType, HealthStatus, FirmwareVersion,
    @{N='SizeGB';E={[math]::Round($_.Size/1GB,0)}}

Number matches the N in \Device\HarddiskN. Cross-reference with Get-Partition -DiskNumber N for drive letter.

SMART reliability counters

Get-PhysicalDisk | ForEach-Object {
    $_ | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Select-Object Temperature, Wear, ReadErrorsTotal, WriteErrorsTotal, PowerOnHours
}

Returns blank on some NVMe drives due to Windows driver limitations — fall back to vendor tools (Samsung Magician, CrystalDiskInfo) or smartctl from smartmontools if installed.

Boot Performance & Startup Management

Windows has five separate startup mechanisms, each requiring different tooling. Task Manager only shows two of them. Full inventory in references/startup-mechanisms.md.

Mechanism	Where	How to inspect	How to disable
Registry Run keys	HKCU/HKLM\...\Run (+ WOW6432)	Get-ItemProperty	StartupApproved binary flag
Services	Service Control Manager	Get-Service	Set-Service -StartupType Manual (admin)
Scheduled Tasks at logon	Task Scheduler	Get-ScheduledTask	Disable-ScheduledTask
Startup folder shortcuts	%APPDATA%\...\Startup\ + AllUsers	Get-ChildItem	Delete or rename .lnk
Group Policy startup scripts	HKLM\...\Policies\Scripts	Group Policy Editor / gpresult	(rare on workstations)

The StartupApproved trick (disable HKLM entries without admin)

Task Manager's "Disable" button writes a binary flag to:

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartupApproved\Run    (HKLM 64-bit entries)
HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartupApproved\Run32  (HKLM WOW6432 entries)
HKCU\...\StartupApproved\StartupFolder                                          (startup folder shortcuts)

The value is 12 bytes: [status byte] [00 00 00] [8-byte FILETIME timestamp]. Status = 0x02 enabled, 0x03 disabled. Writing this to HKCU lets a non-admin user disable HKLM startup entries for themselves. The script scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 automates this.

Boot duration measurement

Windows 11 stores boot performance in Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational log (admin to read). Without admin, infer from the gap between Event 12 (The operating system started at...) and Event 6005 (The Event log service was started), then to first user-mode event. Typically:

• Healthy SSD system: 15–25 seconds to login screen
• Healthy + many startup apps: 30–60 seconds to usable desktop
• Failing storage: 60+ seconds, with stalls

Crash Analysis & Dump Triage

Event 41 (Kernel-Power) decoding

This is the crash record. Properties array layout:

Index	Field	What it means
0	BugcheckCode	The stop code (0x0 = no bugcheck recorded → hard power loss or hang)
1	BugcheckParameter1	First parameter (often a memory address)
2-4	BugcheckParameter2-4	Additional parameters
5	SleepInProgress	True if crash during sleep transition
6	PowerButtonTimestamp	Non-zero = power button was held

Common BugCheck codes (full reference in references/bugcheck-codes.md):

Code	Name	Typical cause
0x0	(no bugcheck)	Hard power loss, total hang, hardware-level failure
0xEF	CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED	A critical system process (csrss/services/wininit) was killed
0xD1	DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL	Bad driver accessed bad memory address
0x50	PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA	Bad memory or storage I/O for pagefile
0x124	WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR	Hardware-level CPU/cache/PCIe error
0x7E	SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED	Driver crashed
0x9F	DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE	Driver hung during sleep/wake

Pre-crash timeline correlation

The crash record alone rarely tells you the cause. The events in the 10 minutes before the crash are where the story is. Use:

scripts/crash-triage.ps1 -CrashTime '2026-05-15 00:57:50' -WindowMinutes 10

Look for:

• storahci Event 129 (drive reset) before crash → storage failure cascade
• nvlddmkm / igdkmd64 warnings before crash → GPU driver hang
• WHEA-Logger events before crash → hardware-level fault
• Sudden silence (no events for >30s before crash) → total system hang

Dump configuration audit

Get-ItemProperty 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl' |
    Select-Object CrashDumpEnabled, DumpFile, MinidumpDir, AutoReboot

CrashDumpEnabled values: 0 = None, 1 = Complete, 2 = Kernel, 3 = Small (minidump), 7 = Automatic.

If 0 or no dumps exist after recent crashes:

• Pagefile may be too small (needs >RAM size for complete dump, or >256MB for minidump)
• Power loss crashes can't write dumps regardless — RAM contents are gone before disk write
• Some BSODs in early boot also skip dump-writing

Event Log Query Patterns

Get-WinEvent with -FilterHashtable is dramatically faster than Where-Object filtering. Keys that work:

Key	Type	Example
LogName	string or array	'System', @('System','Application')
ProviderName	string or array	'storahci', 'Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power'
Id	int or array	41, @(7,153,154)
Level	int or array	1=Critical, 2=Error, 3=Warning, 4=Information
StartTime	DateTime	(Get-Date).AddDays(-7)
EndTime	DateTime	(Get-Date)

Use scripts/event-search.ps1 for common patterns (events in time window, by provider, correlated across logs).

Common Failure Modes

Symptom	First check	Common cause
Slow boot, used to be fast	startup-audit.ps1	Bloat accumulation (Docker, Adobe CC, Electron apps)
Slow boot, getting worse	disk-health.ps1	Failing drive — Windows waiting on probe timeouts
Random freezes + hard restarts	disk-health.ps1 + crash-triage.ps1	storahci resets cascading into kernel hang
BSOD on wake from sleep	crash-triage.ps1 (BugCheck 0x9F)	Driver power state failure (often GPU, USB)
BSOD with WHEA before it	crash-triage.ps1 (BugCheck 0x124)	Hardware fault — RAM, CPU, PCIe lane
Sluggish but not crashing	health-audit.ps1 performance section	Background process pileup
Login takes minutes	startup-audit.ps1	Slow startup item synchronously blocking shell

Recovery Patterns

Cloning from a failing drive

Never run chkdsk /f on a failing drive — repair operations write to bad sectors and can finish the drive off. Image first, repair the image second.

# Healthy-side clone with no retries (fast, skips bad sectors)
robocopy "Y:\important" "Z:\backup\important" /MIR /R:0 /W:0 /XJ /NDL /LOG:clone.log

For bit-level recovery from a drive with many bad sectors, use ddrescue (via WSL or live Linux USB) with a map file so the operation is resumable. Documented in references/storage-events.md.

Physically removing a failing drive

If a drive is causing boot stalls or crashes:

1. Identify it via disk-health.ps1
2. Verify nothing critical points at it (scripts/disk-health.ps1 -CheckDependencies <drive-letter>)
3. Physically disconnect SATA cable OR disable in BIOS OR set offline in diskpart
4. Reboot — boot time should drop significantly, controller resets should stop

Voice & Output Style

Output follows the claude-mods diagnostic convention:

• [PASS] / [FAIL] / [WARN] / [INFO] prefixes for scan rows
• Verdict block at the bottom with specific findings + recommended actions
• Drive identifications include physical disk number, model, capacity, drive letter
• Crash references include UTC timestamp, BugCheck code, primary parameter, suspected cause
• No marketing language, no emojis in scripts (reserved for SKILL.md prose where useful)

What This Skill Doesn't Cover

• Network diagnostics → use net-ops
• Specific application performance profiling → use perf-ops
• Source-code-level debugging → use debug-ops
• Kernel dump file analysis with WinDbg — too specialised for this skill; covered by reference doc pointers only
• Group Policy diagnostics — relevant for enterprise but rare on workstations
• Linux-on-Windows (WSL) issues — separate domain

Cross-References

When	Use
Need to triage a remote Windows box	net-ops reverse-probe pattern adapts directly
Crash is networking-related	Combine with net-ops for DNS / VPN driver issues
Multiple machines exhibit same pattern	Run health-audit.ps1 on each, diff the outputs

References

• references/storage-events.md — full event ID catalog for disk, storahci, Ntfs, partmgr, volmgr providers. Load when investigating disk errors, mapping \Device\Harddisk N references, or interpreting LBA-level I/O failures. Includes severity triage thresholds (per-month counts that indicate failure for HDD vs SSD) and the query recipes the audit script uses.

• references/bugcheck-codes.md — Windows BSOD stop-code catalog covering the codes that actually appear on workstations. Load when decoding a non-trivial Event 41, analyzing a minidump's stop code, or matching a symptom ("crashes during sleep", "random reboot no dump", "crashes during file copy") to a likely cause. Covers 0xEF, 0xD1, 0x124, 0x50, 0x7A, 0x9F and the special 0x0 case.

• references/startup-mechanisms.md — Deep dive on all five Windows startup mechanisms: registry Run keys, services, scheduled tasks, startup folders, group policy. Load when doing a full startup audit, hunting vendor-installed auto-launch hooks across multiple mechanisms, or implementing the StartupApproved disable trick. Includes vendor-pattern checklists (Adobe, Docker, NVIDIA) and edge cases like WMI permanent event consumers and IFEO Debugger redirects.

• references/recovery-patterns.md — Drive-failure data recovery (robocopy /R:0, ddrescue with map files), filesystem repair (chkdsk decision tree — when NEVER to /f), system file integrity (sfc, DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth), boot configuration repair (BCD, bootrec, UEFI bootloader rebuild), pagefile relocation, drive removal procedures (software offline → BIOS-disable → physical disconnect → destruction), and no-boot recovery (Windows RE, Safe Mode, System Restore). Load when responding to "my drive is dying" or any irreversible/destructive operation.

• references/uac-attribution.md — Attributing an unexplained UAC prompt to its caller: the 30-second in-the-moment playbook (Show details → note command line → decline → check Security 4688), the after-the-fact forensic ladder (Prefetch/PECmd run times, BAM FILETIME decode, npx _npx cache, agent-transcript time correlation — all in one elevated pass, never elevated via gsudo itself), the process-creation auditing countermeasure, and the npx auto-install footgun. Load when responding to "what asked for admin?", an unexpected elevation prompt, or post-incident process attribution.

• references/remote-diagnostics.md — PowerShell remoting patterns (WS-Man and SSH transports) for running this skill against a remote Windows box. Authentication models (Kerberos, NTLM, CredSSP, SSH keys), TrustedHosts setup for workgroup machines, the double-hop problem, common error catalog, and a complete worked example: stage the skill on the target via Copy-Item -ToSession, then invoke each script remotely and parse the JSON output. Load when troubleshooting "my dad's PC across town", a server in a datacenter, or any Windows machine where physical access isn't available.

Worked example

A user reports "my PC takes minutes to boot and crashes sometimes." Running scripts/health-audit.ps1 produces a panel that follows the Terminal Panel Design System:

╭── 🩺 windows-ops · health-audit ──────────────────────────────────────────── TITAN ───●
│
├── 4 disks · 1 failing · 2 unclean shutdowns
│
├── failing (5)
│   ├── [storage] Disk 1 (HGST HDN728080ALE6…   Failing: Event7=1943, Event154=1646 …
│   ├── [storage] Controller resets             20 storahci controller resets in 60d
│   ├── [crash] 2026-05-15 00:57                BugCheck=0x0 — hard power loss
│   ├── [crash] 2026-05-11 00:12                BugCheck=0x0 — power button held
│   └── [crash] Pattern                         2 unclean shutdowns — investigate PSU
│   │   ▲ back up + disconnect Disk 1 (Y) — see recover-clone.ps1 and drive-deps.ps1
│
├── warn (2) · pass (7) · info (4)
│
╰── R refresh · D drill · ? help ──────────────────────── ⬤ storage  • 2 crashes ───●

The verdict reads at a glance: storage is busted (⬤ — large, unmissable), two crashes recent (•), specific drive identified by [Y], action items inlined under the critical alert with cross-script wayfinding. Drill into the suspect:

╭── 🩺 windows-ops · disk-health ──────────────────────────────────── Disk 1 / Y ───●
│
├── HGST HDN728080ALE604 · A4GNW91X · 7452 GB · HDD/SATA
│
├── FAILING (3)
│   ├── Event 7 (bad block)              ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰      1943x
│   ├── Event 154 (hw error)             ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰      1646x
│   └── Controller resets                ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱      20x
│   │   ▲ back up data, run drive-dependencies.ps1, then replace
│
╰── B back · C clone · ? help ────────────────────────────────────── ⬤ failing ───●

Pip bars show how many times over threshold each indicator runs. Before disconnecting, audit dependencies:

╭── 🩺 windows-ops · drive-dependencies ─────────────────────────────────── Y ───●
│
├── 0 system references · safe to disconnect
│
│   💡 no system mechanism references this drive
│
╰── B back · ? help ────────────────────────────────────────────────── • safe ───●

Three commands, three panels, complete decision tree. Then the same loop: crash-triage.ps1 decodes the most recent crash with a T-relative pre-crash timeline; safe-disable-startup.ps1 -List panel-displays every Run-key / StartupFolder entry grouped by state; recover-clone.ps1 -Source Y:\important -Destination Z:\rescue clones with robocopy /R:0 so retries don't accelerate the drive's death; boot-perf.ps1 quantifies boot duration with capacity pip bars.

The data was always there in the System log — this skill just asks for it correctly and renders it like a proper instrument.

Legacy workflow notes

For non-panel verbose tracing add -Verbose. For machine-readable consumers add -Json (all scripts emit NDJSON / JSON suitable for jq). For piped contexts (no TTY) chrome rendering disables itself automatically and JSON-only output is appropriate.

Full command sequence:

scripts/health-audit.ps1                            # diagnose
scripts/disk-health.ps1 -DriveLetter Y              # drill into suspect
scripts/crash-triage.ps1                            # decode most recent crash
scripts/drive-dependencies.ps1 -DriveLetter Y       # verify safe to disconnect
scripts/recover-clone.ps1 -Source Y:\ -Destination Z:\rescue  # salvage data
scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 -List              # audit startup state
scripts/safe-disable-startup.ps1 -Name 'Adobe*','Granola','MuseHub'  # cull bloat
Set-Service AdobeARMservice -StartupType Manual     # service-tier (admin)
# (physical) disconnect failing drive, reboot
scripts/health-audit.ps1                            # verify clean