Help! System reset nightmare...

SteBobbajob

I’m currently having an absolute nightmare with my laptop.

I installed several windows/Dell updates on my laptop over the weekend, but it felt a little unstable while playing games etc. afterwards, so thought I’d completely reset the laptop. Having gone the laborious process of resetting the laptop, I get a blue screen that says ‘Hi there, lets get a few basic things out of the way’ where it prompts me to enter my country, language keyboard layout etc. and click continue.

All seems to be ok at this stage, as it tells me to wait just a moment while it does the necessary updates, but when it eventually boots back up, it goes right back to very same screen. Its seems to be stuck in a perpetual loop. Nothing in advanced settings (system Restore, System Image Recovery, Start-up Repair etc.) appear to work, as it tends to tell me that it was unable to perform the action for some reason.

At one point yesterday evening, I was able to perform a reset, removing just some of the windows files I believe? This actually worked and for the first time it booted up and all seemed fine. I was relieved and thought that was the end of it. So as I was getting the laptop set up once again, I ran some windows updates. When these had completed, I was prompted to restart the laptop which I did. The laptop powered back up and the log in screen appeared as normal. Once logged in however, the screen was completely black, with only my cursor visible. I looked for a few possible fixes online but none seemed to work, so I eventually decided to do another reset. Low and behold, this eventually brought me right back to the initial screen/loop I’d spent two days trying to resolve. So now I’m right back to square one and I have no idea what I need to do to fix the issue and the advanced settings don’t appear to want to work again.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

mordeith

When you say reset do you mean a factory reset as opposed to a complete reinstall of windows?

SteBobbajob

It would have been a factory reset.

Alanstrainor

So the question is, have you backed up everything you needed from your hard drive before starting this process? Files/photos/docs etc? If so I would go down the route of downloading a Windows 10 ISO and begin the process of doing a clean install. Format your Windows install drive to start from fresh. Something sounds very wrong with how Windows is attempting to do a reset, starting from fresh is the next step.

SteBobbajob

There's nothing on the laptop that I necessarily want to keep, so I'm happy to wipe everything and start from scratch. That was what I was attempting to do initially.



One question though, how do I go about downloading and running windows on the laptop, in its current state? I'm not entirely clued up on all this.

Alanstrainor

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO

You may be able to download an image from Dell, but honestly I would just download straight from Microsoft. The process is easy, you can use their media creation tool to create your bootable USB to install.

download the latest win 10 iso and get a min 8gb size usb key

create a bootable install from the iso (google this)

in your bios (press f12 on restart usually to get into bios) set usb drive as bootable

then turn on and install win 10 from usb key

the only issue could be if secureboot is blocking usb set to bootable

set secureboot off if it's on in windows settings (google)

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/disable-secure-boot-in-windows

put back on later

SteBobbajob

Thanks all


Can I use my external hard drive to do this or does it have to be a USB stick?

SteBobbajob

SteBobbajob wrote: »

Thanks all


Can I use my external hard drive to do this or does it have to be a USB stick?

not sure - could work but you might have to format the whole thing.

actually you probably can just upgrade straight from the download tool without creating a bootbable drive straight from the download tool -> pick the upgrade this pc now option when you download and run the download tool

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10