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.
Nah, I’m currently trying to fix a PC that is so borked, that not even a clean install.wim can fix. According to some sources, there are some packages missing in current installation medias, that are not needed for the installation, but you cannot repair a borked install, if those are affected. This seems to be the case since at least somewhen in 2021, from which I found the earliest reports. Oh… and they aren’t in the online image as well. So if those break, you can only do a clean install.
The trick to a successful DISM though is matching the broken system’s patch level with that of the source files. DISM basically repairs your component store using the source, so for it to work properly, you’d want to use the same OS patch level store as the source. I used to keep a few good Windows VMs at different patch levels for this purpose. I’d then patch the VM up to the same level as that of the broken machine (if needed), and then use the good VM as the DISM source.
In any case, if DISM keeps failing, then a repair install (aka in-place upgrade) usually does the trick.