Look into CLONING your drive. It's a little more work if your machine is a laptop but I've done it.

A real simple method is drive duplication as opposed to using installed software. Do a search on Amazon "drive duplicator."

I got this result: Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function

The result is a drive that you can swap and you get everything you had at the time of duplication. Saves a lot of headaches.

Just a note from "SuperflyTNT" - never had that problem with drive duplication. A friend of mine steered me toward drive duplication after he had exactly the problem about losing product key / registration. No problems after switching to the duplication process

My condolences, just take this as a lesson learned (and I've learned plenty due to negative incentives).

For your reference, if a computer is POWERED off before a shutdown completes, disk corruption can occur (been there, done that). A boot disk will allow access to other recovery tools before a nuclear clean install.

1. I recently found out that windows automatically creates restore points when it updates or when other criteria are met. It recently restored my notebook that I "fingered" somehow and while windows would boot, it said it didn't have my profile so my personalizations (windows and programs) were gone. Jumping back to a restore point solved the problem rather quickly rather than a restore from backup (though I will say, from practice, I have LIMITED faith in restore points).

2. For the future (and perhaps the past), get a free copy of Macrium Reflect and create an image of your drive on another drive (external fine). Now the working windows is saved. Then see if you can go back to the corrupted version (undo the fix), and try restore points. However, if you did a clean install, the corrupted version might be gone. Hopefully you have your installation media and serial numbers available for the "old" programs. No disrespect, but a "clean install" is the solution of last resort.

Once you have an image, with periodic updates (Macrium does that), when (not if) a problem occurs, it's straightforward to reinstall the old image and everything is as it was, minus the changes since the last backup. Has saved my a** a number of times (even with something as simple as a config change that didn't go as planned - easier to restore than try and backtrack).

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Once everything is reinstalled, a number of programs that will collect your software keys, or at least a lot of them. I've used Belarc Advisor:

https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor

Just to clarify a few things that have been suggested. First, any backup software also has the capabilities of making an image of the present OS. You do not need to download new free or commercial software to do that. And be aware that a system image and a file backup are two different things. A regular backup will be searchable, and you can restore one or more files as you choose.

On the other hand, the system image is not searchable (as someone implied here). As pointed out in a Microsoft community discussion in January, "The system image is very useful.... A disadvantage of this type of backup is that it cannot be used for selective file restoration. You can only use it when you need a complete restoration of your entire Windows drive." A system image is a bit-for-bit copy of your installed Windows OS and operating programs.

I often do not make a system image since I am fine with finding the newest versions of my favorite programs and re-installing them. But you must have registered all your programs so that the authoring entities know that you have a valid copy and will gladly let you get the latest installers.

Windows 10 has a number of built-in error checking routines. To check your memory, click on the search icon near or in the Start button and type in "windows memory diagnostic." Follow the recommended restarting of your computer. To check a drive, visit "This PC" and right-click on the drive. Click on the tab, "Tools," and follow the instructions for finding errors and fixing them. --Richard

Yes, I understand but to boot another OS (a clone) in this case while one has another system runing on the same computer, Macrium Reflect or other software must set up a virtual machine within the orginal OS and operator from there. If the system completely crashes and needs replacing then this bootable close could be copied to the original computer, I'm sure. But as I said, this is all more complicated than I thought the newbie was asking for. Plus, the system image is not searchable unless one installs it in a virtual machine. Thus, by itself it is not searchable in the way that a file system backup is. --Richard