New user question. This Dell OptiPlex has be upgraded from Win7Pro since the first week it was available with no problems. It had been running overnight and when I went to login I typed in my password and hit enter the balls started to rotate (about a 1/4 turn) and stopped (froze). I was forced to hold the power switch till the system shutdown. Everything came back up normal but on every attempt to log in, I get a 1/4 turn of the balls and it freezes again. I can see shares from remote computers but can not log in. I cant figure out how to get it in to safe mode or do anything else.
Any suggestions on how to get back on my system?
When you get to the login page, you will see a power button at the bottom right corner of your screen. It will say, shutdown and restart. Before clicking restart, press and hold the shift key down. Click restart, it will say, please wait.
After restart, it will bring up an advanced startup menu. Click troubleshoot, then click advanced, "or whatever is below RESET your PC, then click on advanced startup, then restart.
After restart, press 5 for safe mode with networking. Do not press 4 for just safe mode, as there is a bug in the Start menu as it crashes. Safe mode with networking works fine.
You can also do a system restore in the advanced options as well.
If its freezing before getting to desktop, I'm suspecting hardware drivers may be causing an issue there.
Sorry, lost my password and this has taken me a bit to get back in.
your instructions on how to get in to safe mode were great! I did get back in and uninstalled the last 2 programs I did put in before the freeze but still cant get in so either this was a windows 10 upgrade that made something old stop working or I haven't uninstalled far enough back. I have been going through the event viewer looking for some driver error listed but all I see is a dcom failure. do you have any other suggestions of what to look for the get me back in normally?
You may need to go back into safe mode, and possibly create a new user account. Create the account, then reboot Windows, and log into the new account. Not sure if safe mode allows the addition of new accounts, but you may be limited on what you can do here.
If all else fails, you may need to reload Windows. There is always a chance something got corrupted on your Windows 10 Installation.
Do you have a Windows 10 Disk? If not? Do you have the Windows 7 Pro Recovery Media that comes with your machine?
Some Recovery Media allows the user to back up all of your data before reinstalling Windows.
In my experience as a computer tech, I always strive to keep extra hard drives handy, just in case I want to install a clean copy of Windows on a new Hard drive. If you don't want to lose data that you absolutely need, You should probably buy a new hard drive, install Windows on the new hard drive, and then transfer all of your personal files from the old hard drive to the new one, plus, create a backup of your files, and create a new image of your system.
If you do not have your Windows 7 Recovery Media, or do not have a Windows 10 disk. it is easy to download the Windows 10 Iso online.
If you have another computer, go to google. Type in "Windows 10 Media Creation tool"
There should be a link to go ahead and download the Media Creation tool from Microsoft.
Once downloaded, Run the tool, and it will give you the option to download Windows 10, or Windows 10 N. Make sure to only download Windows 10, and to get the x64 bit version of Windows. You can either create a bootable USB drive, or create an ISO to burn to a DVD.
After you do what you choose, go to your computer that is having the problems, go into the BIOS, or UEFI, depending on what kind of bios your system has, and go into the boot options, and change the boot settings to either boot from the DVD or the USB drive, depending on which one you chose to do.
Hope this helps, and maybe someone else can offer better advice, but this is what I would do in this type of situation.
Well, I did the windows reset with save data, and it came back and I can log in again, but of course I need to find all my licenses and keys for everything I had installed which is tough for companies out of business or online purchases like adobe acrobat that wants an uninstall before a reinstall etc. lessons learned, good backups, keep your keys in a safe place, keep your install media in a safe place, use the windowssh blog! Thank you Imaneke, sorry this took so long to finish.
You're welcome. Glad I was able to help
