I've had an update appear on my desktop for a while, and kept hitting "Remind me Later" since I had a lot of things on my PC that I wanted to finish up first. I left over the weekend, and there was a power outage while I was gone. (My PC is on a surge protector, so it shouldn't have been damaged from that.) I figured that since I didn't have anything active left on my PC after starting it back up, I'd just hit the restart button and let it run the update.
Then things went wrong.
It seemed like a pretty big update, seeming to take forever to finish. When it did, I was taken to a blue screen that asked me what kind of keyboard layout I wanted, and then took me to a bunch of troubleshooting options. Stuff like "Startup Repair", "System Restore", etc.
The default partition that it's trying to start was "Windows Rollback", but every time I hit the button to start things up, it just took me back to the blue troubleshooting screen. My hard drive only has two partitions, the one that's normally used, and a "Recovery" partition. However, this troubleshooting setup is listing three. One is the "Windows Rollback" that isn't working. The other two are both labeled as "Windows", but I don't get any other information. I'm assuming that one is my main partition that I use, and the other is the Recovery drive.
I tried loading from one of those partitions, but when I put my Windows password in, it takes about twenty minutes to get any response beyond "Just a Moment", and even then it's only error boxes saying that important things like "explorer.exe" are missing. (Also, somehow I made one of those partitions the new default that Windows tries to boot from, and I while I can pick which one I want from the blue menu, I don't know how to swap the default back.)
So, I tried using my laptop and an external hard drive to download a Media Installation Tool from Microsoft's site, and use it as a USB recovery tool. When I hit "Repair My Computer", I'm just taken back to the original blue menu screen.
System Restore won't work because it claims that no restore points exist. Startup Repair keeps failing. At this point, I just want my computer to actually start. If I have to completely start from scratch, I'll deal with it and start re-installing everything. However, my computer was using a copy of Windows that was built-in when I got it. I have no idea how to use the Installation Tool that I set up, and I'm completely stumped.
I'm absolutely pissed because my computer was working perfectly when I got back to my dorm room, and only broke after hitting "Update and Restart". If I hadn't updated my computer, I wouldn't be having any problems at all. Does anybody have any clue what I'm supposed to do?
EDIT: So, after posting all of this and spending something like three hours, I finally got the option to "Reset my PC", which is *supposed* to fix things like factory settings without deleting everything. This option was not there before, and I don't know why it suddenly appeared. I'm going to try using it and see if I can get things working again. Wish me luck!
Edited by kurt91, 21 May 2018 - 02:36 AM.