Windows 10 won't boot after update, unable to recover from recovery drive

[thenewguy]

Hi all,

having a problem after installing a Windows 10 update last night. I chose to update & shutdown instead of reboot, it seems this is now coming back to bite me. The issue is as follows:

if I boot normally (all drives connected), the computer doesn't get past the UEFI splash screen AT ALL. It just completely freezes there. Unplugging the boot drive leads to the "BOOTMGR missing" screen. I've identified the boot SSD as the cause of the issue here. So I tried to use a recovery USB drive to restore a previous point. However, I cannot do this because in order to get into UEFI to choose to boot from the USB, I have to have the SSD connected  DISCONNECTED (otherwise it again just freezes on splash). When I then boot into the installation/recovery and reconnect the SSD, it doesn't recognize/see it. The recovery thing produces an error saying there's no Windows installation. I tried connecting the SSD straight after choosing to boot from USB (UEFI mode), which just caused the UEFI to freeze on splash again. Connecting the SSD while inside UEFI caused the entire UEFI to freeze.

 

I can see and access files on the SSD on my laptop through a SATA to USB adapter. This leads me to believe the SSD isn't broken, there's just something on there from the update preventing the boot sequence from happening correctly.

 

Does anybody have ideas how I could fix this without wiping and reinstalling completely? I would very much prefer to avoid that. Thanks for reading!

 

 

edited to add: this is my drive config:

-250GB Evo 840 (Windows)

-2TB Seagate (files)

-3TB Toshiba (files)

[thenewguy]

Connected the SSD while the Windows logo from the recovery drive is being displayed. It still won't allow me to restore (no windows installation), but when I go into the cmd prompt and use diskpart, I can at least SEE the SSD is connected. Anywhere to go from here?

[thenewguy]

push... any help at all would be greatly appreciated! I'm at wits end here

[PotatoDave]

Not sure what's going on, not great with Windows, but back up your data now while you still have the chance. 

[thenewguy]

9 hours ago, PotatoDave said:

Not sure what's going on, not great with Windows, but back up your data now while you still have the chance. 

Yep I'm on it. Thanks 

[thenewguy]

I'm surprised nobody has any idea at all. At this point I've conceded and will just do a fresh install.