I had the message this morning that my system needed to be restarted for a Windows Update, something I've done a million times.

Only now my computer is BORKED. After it downloaded and started the update, got to it's 35% mark where it shuts down and restarts, and now all I have is a black screen with a small blue circle/mouse pointer thing constantly changing from the blue circle to the white mouse pointer, always on a black screen. I tried turning it off and back on again, but it always gets to the same black screen with a "something" on constantly flickering from blue circle to white mouse pointer. This last time I thought I'd let it sit and it's been almost a half hour and nothing is changing.

Dear God please don't tell me I've lost my computer. The one I'm typing this on is well over 12 years old and won't run quite a few games that I play. I don't know what to do. God damned Windows Updates. Fucking god damned Microsoft.

Okay, I read somewhere that unhooking everything from it (wireless mouse/keyboard, controller, and headset) could help so I tried that.

Now I no longer have the black screen and blue cursor/white mouse pointer thing constantly flickering, now it comes up to BIOS every time.

I'm totally fucked aren't I.

While in BIOS I tried a couple of things but nothing worked. I turn it off and back on, the BIOS screen comes up. I exit BIOS, it does it's thing likes it restarting only to return to... the BIOS screen.

Emeffing Microsoft and their goddamned no choice "updates" that has screwed things up for me many times in the past and has now it appears torched my best/only relatively new (2020) computer.

The whole world really is going to shit. I blame myself.

If you have an alternate PC that you can access, you can get the virtual image of whichever Windows you have, set it up on an USB and then use that to repair or if not able to, reinstall from scratch.

I think a 16GB stick is needed at a minimum for Windows 11.


Also, yes, Microsoft are borking Windows 11 and don't care about the damage to its consumers.

What windows is this? You haven't mentioned it. Problems like these are exactly why I usually delay the updates till the end of the month just in case there are issues that can be fixed till I update. I haven't used 11 but on 10 you could try to start the PC in safe mode and then try to either uninstal the update or maybe use restore point if you have it active from before the update

If the computers enters BIOS/UEFI then it's hardware it's probably good. If won't boot to the operating system, my first thought is that most likely the BIOS/UEFI settings got a reset and it either won't find the bootloader or secure boot keys got erased / wrong setting to what was previously setup. (most modern computers will enter EUFI if no strorage drive is detected)

Some more knowledgeable user might point you to a solution but you may try to follow the honglath tip, create a USB boot drive and try to automatic repair the issue. It never worked for me though.

The first step would be to somehow get out of the BIOS and return to the Windows boot process (even if that one fails afterwards). The BIOS usually contains settings for boot device priority and temporary override options. Is there a possibility to select the main drive (HDD or SSD) and try to boot from it? Any error messages at that point will be immensely helpful.

Once there are attempts to boot from disk, there are more options: After a few failed attempts to boot Windows, it should automatically enter the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), which has more available action such as booting into Safe Mode or trying a "Startup Repair".

edit:
OFG, can you please provide more information on what kind of computer you have: desktop or notebook?
A notebook might show an error code via blinking status LEDs. Desktop computers sometimes have status LEDs or 7-segment number displays on the motherboard to signal error codes.

Thanks guys for all of the suggestions. Before I posted here I had called a local techie I have used before, but didn't get an answer so I left a message and then I came and posted here (and did some searches to see if I could figure out anything but of course I can't). I was thinking it would be tomorrow at the earliest that I would here back from him.

But I was wrong. He's here. Right now. Dude was in my area on another call and wow, he just showed up at the door LOL.

Anyway, no joy yet, and at $130 an hour if I get no joy soon I'll have to give up because I don't think it makes sense to pay more than $500 to repair a 2020 laptop that I might be able to match performance wise today for less than $1,000 (guessing???).

I'll let you know the verdict.

Weirdest thing. I was playing Fallout 4 this morning like any other morning, all is well, but I have to go pee so I save and exit and upon exit I see the message saying an update was available and my computer needed to be restarted. So I did it (like I've done hundreds of times now it seems) then immediately looked on my other computer (this one I'm typing on right now) and it too had the message so I hit Update and Restart for both of them. This one did it's thing, and came back up like always. The other one did it's thing until the actual restart occurred and then it was stuck with a black screen with a spinning blue cursor. I tried powering down and back up several times and that's all I kept getting was the black screen. Then I read that USB devices could cause such an issue so I unhooked everything, and then I no longer get that black screen and spinning blue cursor, now all I get is to the BIOS screen. And no matter what options I try, it never gets past the BIOS screen.

I sure hope he figures it out. Godamned Microsoft.

Anyway, thank you guys so much for the suggestions. I was panicking and wasn't sure when I might get in touch with this guy so I posted here in haste. I do apologize.

If it borked in the middle of an update, it is plausible the system was being overwritten. Which means its cooked, because it didnt finish.

If your guy can determine if the files were only being downloaded and backed up. It is possible the update can be erased and the os is back to normal. But pertaining to what you describe, it seems more likely it was already downloaded and overwriting stuff.

....which is bad.


edit:

If your guy has time and skill, he could make a clone of the drive. Dump it into a VirtualBox and see if the os is even capable of functioning. But that could be hours of waiting if you have a huge drive.

Could also just pull the drive out and test it inside another pc. Just to see what happens.

Many helpful people around here, and good advice. Hard to say though what's actually happening, here's my comments.

Forcibly shutting it down during a Windows update might have borked your installation. All your personal files will still be there likely.

To get Windows back, just use a USB bootable stick with Windows, and repair it. If not able to, reinstall option whilst keeping all files would be the last option.

If you want to back up anything on the Windows drive, I recommend a bootable USB stick with Linux on it (like Ubuntu). You boot into it, open the drive in Files, copy personal files to another drive, and you're safe. Then go ahead and reinstall Windows, from it's own USB stick.

Sometimes the simple stuff gets forgotten. I concur, linux+ copy all the crap he wants to keep. I havent fixed someone pc in a long time. I skipped the basics xD

Yeah, it was borked. Completely. Totally. Redundantly. And though the man says it was just a coincidence that it happened during a Windows Update, I'll believe forever it was that, because, you know, that's when it borked.

Thanks everyone. For everything. I always liked it here and I wish all of you the very best in these trying times. And always remember, when the going gets tough, don't sweat it, just fire up your favorite title and take it out in gaming. Good luck everyone.

Did you fixed it?

If it was me, i would have put an image of the OS and try to repair or reinstall completly, it happend to me a few month ago in an old laptop during an update, i am in linux and still have it on an USB bootable with the OS so i just sticked the Bootable USB and an external drive, i copied all data i needed and made a fresh install, everything worked perfectly after that, it should be the same with Windows i guess.

You mean it was a hardware problem? Well, updates can require some pretty serious disk activity, so if it's on its last legs, that may trigger the actual failure.

But, of course, updates can and quite a number of times do bork systems. Always a... well, I wouldn't even say good, but just normal, policy to delay them for quite a while, search for reports about possible issues, and make a system backup before applying them.
I know I'll feel quite a relief when Win 10 will stop getting updates. After staying on 7 for years after that stopped getting updates, I really didn't miss the monthly anxiety spike triggered by them, and the wasted time and potential added issues or undesired changes. Definitely feel way, way less safe with updates, "security" or not, than without.

It really sucks when that happens. I blame the fact that a lot of gaming laptops are designed poorly and use low quality parts, especially more recent ASUS products.

I'd say getting ~5 years out of one that is heavily used without a hardware failure is actually better than average nowadays.

Okay, so the tech guy who "fixed" my computer explained the issue to me this way. I had two 2TB PCIe SSD drives. They were set up in RAID 0 (not sure if that's the right number or not). It's the RAID setup that takes two 2TB SSD's and combines them into one 4TB "drive" utilizing both drives simultaneously to increase performance by having both drives read/write simultaneously. So if you were going to save a 100GB file, in a normal setup the time it would take to store/retrieve that file would be how long it takes for one drive to read/write 100GB of data whereas with this RAID, it basically splits that 100GB file into two, thus reducing the time to read/write that data as it only takes as long as it takes for each drive to read/write 50GB.

But the result is, you basically have everything split into two halves, with half of everything on one drive and half on the other such that if either one of those drives fails you lose everything, because you're left with a drive that has only one half of all of the files on it. And according to him, and the messages he was getting when he first got here that this is what happened.

So to fix it, he had to disable RAID, and then reinstall everything (including the Windows operating system) on the good remaining drive. However, here's the thing. According to Windows (and some diagnostics that he ran after), both drives are in fact still good. Both drives, after undergoing diagnostic testing, give the same result of both drives being "healthy" (screenshot).

So, if it is the case that both drives are healthy and operating normally, my question is can I (and if I can, then SHOULD I) treat one of the drives as an "internal back up" so to speak by, I dunno, once a week or once a month just copy everything on drive C to drive D and sort of ham handedly come up with a home made version of the RAID setting that does just that? Or should I avoid using that second drive completely? What would you do?