My wife has a pretty old laptop – a Dell Latitude E5510. I don’t know how old it is, but it has a 9-pin serial port on it, which makes it pretty old.
A while back I installed Windows 10 on it. Since doing that, it has worked just fine until now – this morning it was stuck in a repair loop.
I tried restarting in Safe Mode with Networking and in basic Safe Mode. It wouldn’t restart in either. I finally got it to restart in Safe Mode with Command Prompt, and I was able to do a directory listing on the hard drive, which told me that the hard drive was not the problem.
I suspected that a rogue Windows update was the culprit; so I chose “Troubleshoot” then “Uninstall update” from the start screen. I wasn’t able to uninstall either the most recent feature update or the most recent quality update. (Don’t you love those “clear as mud” names for the updates!)
I figured I would need to reinstall Windows, so I installed the drive in my other computer and booted it up, to copy the data off of the drive. I thought it would be treated as the 2nd drive, but it actually was the primary drive – it booted to that drive. It showed the Windows update screen with the spinning wheel for a couple of minutes, then let me log into Windows. I could tell I was on my wife’s drive, because of what I saw on the drive. So I figured the drive was now ok – Windows had somehow fixed whatever the problem was.
I then installed the drive back in my wife’s laptop and fired up the laptop. But I was once again stuck in the repair loop! On a lark, I tried once again to uninstall the most recent feature and quality updates. It failed immediately on the feature update, but it ran for a good while before failing on the quality update. I then restarted the computer, and I was able to successfully log into Windows 10!
My gut tells me that there was a hardware update that caused Windows to hang (it is, after all, a very old laptop). So I ran Group Policy Editor and told it not to install device updates, just to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
So far, so good….
with Windows 8.1 running in a VM
