I have a dual boot machine on which Linux is my daily driver.  I had a Win 10 pro install that I 'upgraded' to Win 11 in January this year.  Unfortunately, when I did the upgrade, I did not create a new recovery drive, nor did I make a new restore point ... uugghh

All good until a recent Win 11 update in mid-May.  The OS reported disk corruption issues after the update - and some files could not be accessed initially after.   CHKDSK fixed most of the issues.  

There are, however, some residual problems, the main one being the the start menu does not work.

I have tried a number of things to fix the issue;

eg sfc /scannow  (this fails part way thru the scan);

 -  various dism operations (this fails using both local source files and files from an iso or usb stick source)

 - windows update troubleshooter (made some progress with this, but main issues persist)

 - reset windows update service using cmd

 - attempting an in-place repair (fails)

 - PC reset also fails

 - etc (prob some other stuff not mentioned above)

I've got to the point where during a dism restore health operation, I get an error 4448 'The WOF driver encountered a corruption in the compressed files resource table'.  The logs tell a sad story and Online sources tell me that other ppl who have reached this point have had to opt for a clean install, which is where I'm at too.

So, a question on how Win 11 will affect my partitions.  I accept it will mess with GRUB, which I will have to tidy up afterwards.

I have attached a GP-Parted image of my partitioning - it may seem a bit messy to some, but that's how it is.

Re the windows partitions, I have the win11 OS on C , with a separate partition (D) for data and most programs.  There also seems to be a recovery tool partition, another image partition (not sure what's that for), and some boot related stuff. I also have a FAT32 partition so I can swap files between Widows and Linux.

Should I reformat C, the recovery and spare image partition before the clean install, I should I leave things as they are and let the windows 11 installer take care of this (I do not want it to trash my D drive)?  All reasonable suggestions considered!