i destroyed my computer by doing the simplest thing

Unregeneration · 06 Nov 2018

So I decided I wanted to download Fortnite, which requires he Epic Games Launcher, so I download that. While it’s downloading I continued playing Counter Strike, and I got a “Do you want this program to make changes to your computer?” notification and then my screen turns black. After about 15 minutes of pressing the Windows key and Ctrl+Alt+Del I decide to restart my PC. To my surprise I get the blue screen. Then Windows wants to restore my PC to an older version because it “stopped working”.

Now my computer is stuck in a softlock where I get the blue screen and then it tries to recover and then the Windows booting up screen that lasts forever.

How do I get it out of this soft lock?

dalchina · 06 Nov 2018

Hi,
a. Do you have System Restore enabled and any restore points? If so, you could try to use one offline.

Boot your PC from Win 10 bootable medium, via 'Repair your computer' navigate to a system restore prompt.
(You can download a Win 10 iso and create a bootable disk... tutorials here support this)

Note: S. Restore is rather unreliable when restoring. It may simply fail.

b. Do you use disk imaging? We repeatedly urge people to use that, e.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + external disk to store image files.

If you do, you can simply restore a disk image created before this problem occurred.

Which Windows build are you using?
If you don't know, boot your PC from a live boot disk, navigate to any well-known file such as Notepad.exe, explorer.exe, rt click it and examine its Properties- Details.

Steve C · 07 Nov 2018

I did something similar last week whilst fiddling with drivers in Autoruns. Fortunately I recovered from the last Macrium Reflect backup in 10 minutes. I highly recommend Reflect.

AddRAM · 07 Nov 2018

What Dalchina said

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