How to repair a corrupt Group Policy in Windows 11

If the changes made by you using Group Policy Editor are not reflected on the client machine, and you receive errors that may point to the fact that your Windows system is not able to read Group Policy file (registry.pol), then you may need to repair a potentially corrupted Group Policy in Windows 11 or Windows 10. Let us see how you could do this.

Group Policy is a feature of Microsoft Windows Active Directory that allows an administrator to make changes to features on Windows computers on the network. If the changes you are trying to push are not registered on the client machine, then the registry could have a problem.pol file on the client or the Group Policy folder could be missing.

Repair a corrupt Group Policy in Windows 11/10

We will start with the basic suggestion and then move on. You will need to run it on a computer with administrative privileges.

1] Perform System Restore

Perform a System Restore and see if that helps you.

2] Run DISM Tool

When you run DISM (Deployment Imaging and Servicing Management) tool, it will repair Windows System Image and Windows Component Store in Windows 10. This will make sure to restore the folders and files if they are missing or corrupt. All of the system inconsistencies and corruptions should be fixed.

If this does not help, maybe you need to run DISM with a good source which may be on an external drive, using the following commands:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:C:\RepairSource\Windows

Replace C:\RepairSource\Windows with the location of your repair source

To repair an offline image using a mounted image as a repair source, use:

Dism /Image:C:\offline /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:c:\test\mount\windows

See if this has resolved the issue.

Related: Group Policy settings missing in Windows

3] Delete & Recreate missing registry.pol file

All Group Policy settings are stored in registry.pol file. If this file is missing, any changes pushed to the client will not reflect at all. The good news is that you can recreate it. Just to make sure delete the file, even if it exists.

Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\.

Check if it has the registry.pol file. Delete it permanently using Shift + Delete.

To recreate it, open PowerShell with admin privileges.  (Win+X+A)

Execute the following command to refresh Group Policy settings:

gpupdate /force

This will refresh Group Policy and recreate the Group Policy File.

4] Reset Group Policy to default

There are a couple of ways to reset Group Policy to default. This will make sure that if there is any trouble because of current settings, it will be resolved. You can use gpupdate or secedit to do it.

5] Recreate secedit.sdb file

All security settings of Group Policy are stored in secedit.sdb file. If any changes made to security is not reflected, then instead of deleting the group policy file, we need to delete and recreate the secedit.sdb file.

Navigate to C:\WINDOWS\security\Database folder.

Locate secedit.sdb file. Then either rename it or move it to another folder.

Reboot your computer, and it will automatically recreate the file again.

All these tips should help you repair a potentially corrupt Group Policy on Windows computer.

This post will show you how to Reset Windows if you ever feel the need to – and this one How to repair corrupted or damaged Registry.