Advice sought on recovering from what looks like an incompleted update

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I don’t have the laptop with the problem (it’s my son’s) but will have access to it tomorrow, so I’m just trying to get ahead of the situation before I do.

He reports that a few days ago his laptop wouldn’t switch off, so he left it overnight. The next day he found that he couldn’t type into the start menu or search bar; he could launch apps with the mouse (eg browser) and he could type program names after Windows+R to launch things without icons.

When he tries to shutdown it says a program is open but there is no program in the taskbar or showing as active in task manager. If he forces the shutdown and reboots it says “Setting up” then instantly goes to the desktop. When tries to go to Settings to see if there is an incomplete update the Settings window opens for a fraction of a second then closes. When this happens the event viewer shows an error “the server windows immersive control panel did not register”. The recommended fix for this (rename the ImmersiveControlPanel folder in C:\Windows, open an elevated command shell and run sfc /scannow) reports “corrupt file… couldn’t repair” and does not fix the Settings problem.

I found a suggested workaround to the problem of not being able to type into the Start menu: put a shortcut to ctfmon.exe into the  windows start folder. This workaround did not work either.

The laptop is a Lenovo running Win 10 but I’m not sure which exact version. It’s probably too old to run Win 11. It will have a legitimate Windows license but I don’t have any release media for it. He has a not very current backup but almost everything important to him is in the cloud.

Anyone got any helpful advice? He’s bringing the laptop to me tomorrow and I’d like to be able to send him away with a working system.

Cheers
T

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First I would log out of the current user account and try to shutdown and watch and wait a bit.  If it does the shutdown, see if it is fixed when it reboots.

If no shutdown, I had a problem similar to this a couple years ago, the search was broken and some other things didn’t work.  I think I did an install of the same version of Windows 10, keeping apps and data, and that fixed it and not much was lost.   As in here – https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/cant-update-win10-error-0x800703e6/#post-2389339  I did it from a ISO downloaded from microsoft media creation tool, which you can prepare with another computer and copy by USB drive.

-BB

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aquatarkus

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Thanks.

I have already used the media creation tool to get Win 10 21H1 on a USB. I think if it doesn’t shutdown and restart nicely following your log out suggestion, then doing the repair install straight away is probably the best option, although if I can get into any kind of hardware diagnostics on the laptop I will run those first.

cheers
T

 

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look up how to use

sfc /scannnow

and

dism /restorehealth

on cmd run as administrator

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worst case (update partially installed but not completing) – in the recovery console command prompt.. assuming windows is on drive c:..

fix the file system:

chkdsk c: /f

If you have crystaldiskinfo locally, fire it up to check the drive is still OK.. the XP/Zip version works here so I guess the installed one should…

To clear the things Windows is trying to do:

dism.exe /image:c:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

Then hopefully the usual from an elevated command prompt logged into Windows this  should sort it unless the image is actually broken:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /Restorehealth

Of course if it’s the feature update it could get a bit messy, and getting the media and running a repair might sort it but be sure to make some efforts to back up first as there are no concrete guarantees Windows will retain the users folder content..

 

 

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