TECH MS May 1 Update Killed My Laptop. Offline For A While.

Wildweasel

Wildweasel

F-4 Phantoms Phorever
Great. On vacation and as I shutdown an update needs to install.

Once it was done I started my laptop to let any part of the update needed to finish. It never managed to boot up. Just an endless loop of "boot, error, rebooting, error, rebooting, error, rebooting, ad naseum."

Great. How do I do my banking, surf TB, check email and the other sites I monitor? This phone can't cut it, it's slow and extra cumbersome. I bought that laptop just for travel use so I can stay in touch.

I really need that laptop for my banking, no way this phone can handle the task. So I'm off line for the duration. Hopefully there's a computer shop here in Daytona that has time and ability to fix the thing.

If I can't spend my time wasting time online this might get expensive. A bored WW roaming around Daytona is bound to spend money on all kinds of stuff. And that's Madame Wildweasel's job. And the fight will start. Which I'll lose.
 
I'd do a hard shutdown/restart and/or "safe mode" to poke around and try to do a "system restore" to a previous date. Should get you back to par - if you can get to "system restore'. That is if you initiated 'system restore" back in the history of the machine? Otherwise, try startup repair - probably same menu. These days, Windows is amazingly resilient - even if they scare you half to death with error messages and screens-of-death. Your life is usually recoverable.

Frankly this is why I don't allow auto-updates. Wait until the early adopters quit screaming and tearing out their hair over their bricked machines, and the damned company fixes their software mess. Usually within 24-48 hours.
 
lostinaz said:
Been there. Ended up replacing the hard drive with a new one. Make sure you back up your stuff!
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After losing my entire external hard drive last year, I know back up everything daily. It sucked. Was all my family photos covering decades. All of Mike's music, lyrics, and sermons. Some of those I was able to recover from his old hard drive thank God. I sent it to a place in CA that charged me $388 to inspect it. Once they did that it would have been another $1900 to fix and no assurance it would work. I took the $388 loss and said no.
 
It may be posable to fix it by going into safe mode. I think you start the computer and keep taping either F4 or F6 key as it's booting up and it will go into safe mode. I hate DOS and switch over to Apple years ago.
 
Both of my laptops acted up last week in the same fashion. They would boot up, get to the login screen, and just go black. I thought the battery was dead, but it was fully charged. After about 8-10 cycles of this they started working. One did it, and right after it straightened itself out the other one started it. I assume it was some update issue, but I don't have auto-update enabled.
 
Knighttemplar said:
Boot to bios or repair and start from there.
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Posting from a borrowed Kindle today. Much easier than my phone, but still slow with my fat fingers. You never realize how much you needed the cursor keys to space back and forth to edit or correct.

I tried booting into bios. No luck. This update won't play with the bios and locks the machine into a reboot loop that I can't into bios from.

Laptop is at the shop with my last resort instructions that if they can't get it to run as is, wipe the drive and reload Wins10. I'll lose photos and web favorites, but there's only a very stripped down copy of Win10, Edge and Thunderbird on the thing. What sucks is that there's a thumb drive with a bootable copy of the drive from my before we left home.
 
After fighting Microsnot about having to create a microsnot account and basically having my computer on their servers and them having all my info, no privacy. My computer acting as a remote desktop and windows 11 bullshit, i've had enough! All my computers have Linux Mint with Thunderbird mail and Firefox web browser. All my info is on the local computer, not somewhere else. I don't do "cloud" for any reason. Change to Linux operating systems. You wont regret it! There are all kins of flavors to fit your application. I like Mint.

WAB
 
Wildweasel said:
Posting from a borrowed Kindle today. Much easier than my phone, but still slow with my fat fingers. You never realize how much you needed the cursor keys to space back and forth to edit or correct.

I tried booting into bios. No luck. This update won't play with the bios and locks the machine into a reboot loop that I can't into bios from.

Laptop is at the shop with my last resort instructions that if they can't get it to run as is, wipe the drive and reload Wins10. I'll lose photos and web favorites, but there's only a very stripped down copy of Win10, Edge and Thunderbird on the thing. What sucks is that there's a thumb drive with a bootable copy of the drive from my before we left home.
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If the drive is not messed up with Bitlocker (or it does have Bitlocker on but you know your bitlocker key or account info), I would tell them to install a new drive in the machine and not wipe the old one. Getting the data off the drive if it is not messed up with Bitlocker is not that hard, and even if it did have Bitlocker on (as long as you have the Bitlocker key or Account info to get that key back) you can get the data back.


I would also suggest looking into making a USB bootable "System Rescue CD" Linux Distro that you can use next time to at least get your data back off, if not fix the non-booting Windows partition on the drive.
 
No Bitlocker on the machine. It's only a bit above this Kindle in terms of complexity. So there's nothing really worth saving on the drive if it has to be overwritten.
 
Another vote for Linux Mint. Easy to learn. great support and regular updates that don't screw with your system. Most people just have to learn the different icons.
 
Look into Zorin linux it will run some windoz apps. There are some good yt vids of making a standalone usb ssd drive a bootable linux system without touching windoz.
 
Knighttemplar said:
Look into Zorin linux it will run some windoz apps. There are some good yt vids of making a standalone usb ssd drive a bootable linux system without touching windoz.
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Pop os is another popular distribution. The updates issue is cause ma is using ai to code updates. Just peruse all the linix distros out there and try many live boot discs till you find one you are happy with
 
Wildweasel said:
No Bitlocker on the machine. It's only a bit above this Kindle in terms of complexity. So there's nothing really worth saving on the drive if it has to be overwritten.
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Loup, if I may:
WW. Loup is telling you that a new drive is cheap .There is always a possibility to unlock what a SHOP tells you must be over-written. Save the physical device and the data on it!
 
Well, the verdict is in: "dead computer, too old cost too much to repair, yada yada". They did download the drive to a thumb drive for me. They refuse to work on it due to water damage (explains why I got it so cheap used). But it does the job if it will run.

A Western Digital SSD is on its way from Amazon and I've already got RAM to double the memory. Guess I'll be spending next week playing laptop surgeon .

Meanwhile I'll try and boot to bios or from thumb drive and see what I can do.
 
Wildweasel said:
Well, the verdict is in: "dead computer, too old cost too much to repair, yada yada". They did download the drive to a thumb drive for me. They refuse to work on it due to water damage (explains why I got it so cheap used). But it does the job if it will run.

A Western Digital SSD is on its way from Amazon and I've already got RAM to double the memory. Guess I'll be spending next week playing laptop surgeon .

Meanwhile I'll try and boot to bios or from thumb drive and see what I can do.
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Sorry to hear this mess happened.

But, welcome to the linux side of life. As most people have mentioned upthread, there are a zillion different flavors of Linux out there. Linux these days is far easier to use than in the "old days"; a lot of it is literally plug and play. With the SSD and the memory upgrades, your new linux machine will fly! compared to when it was a Windows machine. You'll like it!
 
AlfaMan said:
Sorry to hear this mess happened.

But, welcome to the linux side of life. As most people have mentioned upthread, there are a zillion different flavors of Linux out there. Linux these days is far easier to use than in the "old days"; a lot of it is literally plug and play. With the SSD and the memory upgrades, your new linux machine will fly! compared to when it was a Windows machine. You'll like it!
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If my problem isn't water damage taking its toll on the machine. That's my new worry.
 
Has Loup mentioned creating a Ventoy thumbdrive in this thread yet?

If not, here's the thing: if you have access to download and get Ventoy installed on a 32gb+ (more is mo' betta) thumbdrive, then you can just copy iso images of any linux distro you want to try out or install on the thumbdrive, and when you boot the USB thumbdrive, it gives you a menu of OS's to boot to; you don't have to keep re-writing OS's to go back and forth to compare.
 
Tristan said:
Has Loup mentioned creating a Ventoy thumbdrive in this thread yet?

If not, here's the thing: if you have access to download and get Ventoy installed on a 32gb+ (more is mo' betta) thumbdrive, then you can just copy iso images of any linux distro you want to try out or install on the thumbdrive, and when you boot the USB thumbdrive, it gives you a menu of OS's to boot to; you don't have to keep re-writing OS's to go back and forth to compare.
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I mentioned Ventoy on other threads, and it does work VERY good. I use it with either the Kanguru or Ezitsol brand of high speed drives that have physical write protect switches to make sure that the drive can't get "contaminated" one way or another. And if you get one of the 128GB ones, that gives you a LOT of space to put a bunch of different ISO files (or any of the other types of compressed disk files) on it and boot what you want when you need to.
 
So I got a look at the laptop's innards and it's very shot. Whatever liquid got into it has corroded things that convince me that anything I can do will be a short term action at best.

That said Amazon came thru with a "last year's model" deal on a new 2025 HP 17-inch laptop, just like my dead one with the extra Ram and SSD but with a much more powerful processor and better graphics. It's only 50 cents more than another HP 17-inch on Amazon that's used and several years old.

Besides the downside of the cost I'll be dealing with Windows11 for a few weeks. There are Windows10 and Drive Erase cds waiting at home for a drive wipe a and downgrade away from Win11 as soon as I get home.
 
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