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My home laptop has been merrily chugging away for a couple of years after doing a, W7 to W10 'upgrade' and then periodic updates of its own choosing.
I got a message recently that it was going to do an update sometime soon, clicked through it as I was busy and thought no more about it (which may, or may not be significant).
A couple of days ago, I went to use it and there's just a blank, black screen with an arrow cursor and if I mouse click, a blue whizzy 'wait, I'm doing something' circle. It never gets out of this state. I've done the usual; given it a very stern talking to, clicked for Engerlund, ctrl-alt-del'd and powered it off and on again. Same state.
I don't have W10 media or a thumb drive to boot off or access to another machine to create (no admin rights on my work machine and my spare machine(s) are all pi$$ing about in one form or another...).
Any suggestions from the IT wallahs please?
Normally Windows 10 sorts itself out if you do a hard reset and let it re-load when it's stuck.
My laptop does it every so often. Holding the power button down to shut it off and a restart is normally all that is required.
Very occasionally it will require a few restarts and when it finally boots it will say something like 'Windows didn't especially like that last update, so we ignored it', although it's been over a year since that happened last.
Maybe try restarting yours a few times in quick succession once it hangs and see what happens.
Does the emergency mode not work on startup?
Did you have Windows 10S the light version that only allowed Windows Store apps? I had some issues with our laptop this week as I think support for 10S is being dropped. The main update was massive.
There's then a second update that terminates the S version and makes it full Win10 and it's not very obvious, except that none of the MS apps work until you've run it. The link to the patch pops up in Edge at logon.
It seemed very odd to me that it wouldn't push through on Windows Update automatically but I checked all the site certs and it was/seemed to be totally genuine and it was then that I got warned that this last update would remove the block on apps that were not in the MS store. I wonder if it was deliberate to ensure customers understood the change but it was bloody annoying.
I've powered it off-on-off-on numerous times today - no joy. I though it might be sending the display signal 'elsewhere' so lots of windows key+p results in a grey vertical stripe on the right of the screen where your display choices usually are but no choices...
What's 'emergency mode'? Never heard of that before...
You can invoke Windows startup repair by forcing it to fail to start (turn it on/ forcing it off) 3 times in a row. From there you might be able to do system restore to a prevous date.
If you get no joy with that, Windows 10 is pretty easy to reinstall. Download the official tool here, to a USB drive (at least 8gb), and it'll do all the work for you. (tip, run the downloaded tool from the USB drive, it works better)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10
Thanks. The issue has been having something else to run anything from. I've bought another lappie as a spare and am enjoying the set up shenanigans. At least my data is fine from the old machine. Whipped the drive out, put it in a caddy and got what I needed.
I'm expecting the old machine to play nicely as soon as I revoke the latest W10 update which is slightly annoying...
Just to cheer you up a bit, there should be another new version of Windows out next month.
