Thank God for RDP. It's saved my bacon many times when I was otherwise locked out of various PCs. Glad it worked for (at least some of) you, too.
--Ed--

Sometimes this can happen when the thumbdrive is USB 3 and the PC ports don't load USB 3 drivers until the OS gets booted. That means potential issues with those ports for booting from. This may be...

If you look at the USB flash drive in diskmgmt.msc (Disk Management Console), it should show as Active and Primary Partition if it is bootable, like this:
177711
I believe you have access to...

I'm glad you're finally making some progress. NOTHING is worse than a semi-bricked PC that just won't do anything useful. Hopefully, you'll be able to get yourself a running OS one of these days!...

Just saw another thread over on General Support that has some great advice (tips) on how to access BIOS on Dell PCs/laptops when the machine isn't cooperating. You'll probably want to check this out,...

Came through quickly: here's his response


Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Hope it helps!
--Ed--

Working on it now. Heading over to FB to see if I can raise him over the weekend...
--Ed--

PS: Just posted message; will let you know when a response comes through...

Sounds like you might want to make a support call to Dell, to see if they know any tricks you can use. In the meantime, I have a friend who's a former 3rd-level Dell support tech who now owns and...

Do you have the ability to get into the BIOS when you start booting? I'm afraid you're going to have to manipulate the boot order explicitly that way and force it to boot from the USB flash drive....

It's either that or restoring recent backups, most current first, until you get back to working. Then, you can apply updates one at a time until you figure out which one breaks your system (then...