Computer Shutdown During Windows 10 Upgrade

A Future Pilot · 26 May 2016

Alrighty peoples...y'all are gonna have fun with this one

So a friend of mine's grandmother is rather computer-illiterate. Her computer started to upgrade to Windows 10 and she (thinking that it would delete all of her data) shutdown the computer halfway through. Now on boot (whether normally or in Safe Mode), there's only a black screen with a working mouse cursor. At this point she's OK with either sticking with Windows 7 or upgrading to Windows 10 (I'd prefer upgrading to Windows 10 personally).

So...here's what I've tried so far:

I've tried accessing task manager through Ctrl+Alt+Del. No go.
I've tried getting to the control panel through the sticky keys menu and the ease of access menu. The links aren't there.
I've been able to boot into Recover Mode, but startup repair can't fix it.
I've run sfc /scannow, which says it can't run because of a pending update, so I've run it with /offbootdir and /offwindir options and it's run without reporting any problems.
I've tried installing Windows 10 from a USB stick, but on starting it says there's already an upgrade in progress and to reboot. If I try going ahead it only gives options to save the data, not the applications.

The next thing I want to try is deleting cleanup.xml and pending.xml (if they exist) from Windows\WinSxS\ and see if I can then either run sfc /scannow and/or install Windows 10 from the USB without it thinking there's already an upgrade in progress.

Do any of you have any suggestions? My other thought is if I can figure out a way to get a command prompt at the black screen, I can start setup from the USB stick which would hopefully run the upgrade like normal. However, I haven't figured out a way to get to the command prompt.

Could I run the setup on the USB from the command prompt in recovery?

Thanks for any help y'all can give me!

EDIT: I forgot to add...There are no system restore points to revert to.

dalchina · 27 May 2016

Hi, I'm sure I'm not going to be able to help rescue the situation - here's a starter for 1 and a half.
I'm assuming
a. You don't know how far the upgrade got
b. Your grandmother doesn't use disk imaging (!)
c. There are adequate backups of any data (else your priority is data recovery and backup before trying to make changes - I note you've already started, so assume you've attended to that)

Using a 3rd party partition manager boot disk, please post a screenshot of the partitions you see.
We need to know if they look like Win 10 or Win 7.

If you boot from a live boot disk (there's one at the top of Software and Apps) can you access what should be the Windows partition?

If so, does the partition/disk that should contain Windows have a Windows folder only, or a Windows and a Windows.old folder?

If you have a Windows.old folder, that's where Win 7 now resides.
If