It may bring up WinRE or the UEFI/Trusted Platform Module (TPM) screen – see below. It’s impractical with today’s Windows 10 computers, which can start in eight to 10 seconds, but you can still try it. (You may need to look up which key to press.) That worked when Windows generally took from 40 to 90 seconds to start. If not, you can leave it until the battery runs flat then try again.īefore WinRE arrived, you could get into safe mode by pressing a key such as F2 or F8. (Touching the power button usually invokes a sleep or hibernation mode where the PC can be woken up by a network connection.) In extremis, you can ensure it’s off by unplugging it from the mains and removing the laptop’s battery, if possible.

To make sure it is off, hold the power button down for at least five seconds. However, you are definitely booting your PC if you start with it turned off. That depends on Windows 10 counting boots correctly, as distinct from restarting from sleep or recovering from some other failure. Windows RE is supposed to appear after your PC has failed to boot two or three times. That’s not working on your laptop, but you can try to force it. In theory, WinRE makes it simple to get into safe mode. Safe mode was designed to solve the chicken-and-egg problem that you need to access your PC to fix it, but you can’t access your PC if it won’t start. If you can’t do that, you will have to – as WinRE puts it – “use a device”. From there you can get to safe mode and use the troubleshooting and repair options. So, your first aim should be to get to WinRE. If it can’t fix it, it should switch to the Windows Recovery Environment, otherwise known as Windows RE or WinRE, which boils down to two options:ġ) Start Windows in safe mode using the code on the internal hard drive, then use the troubleshooting routines to fix it.Ģ) Use code on an external device such as a recovery DVD or USB thumbdrive to start Windows, and then repair or replace the code on the internal hard drive.

If Windows 10 knew you had a blank or even a black screen of death, it would try to fix it. Given that tens of thousands of expert programmers have worked on the code over the past 30 years, the number of safe, simple, significant and forwards-/backwards-compatible improvements may be quite small. Microsoft has spent a lot of time (and money) trying to make Windows self-repairing, partly because it generally gets the blame when other programs – or users – try to “improve” it. Said machine then bricked: boot begins, then the screen blanks.Īre there any steps that I can take to recover access to the machine? Failing that, can I recover my files from the hard drive, installed in a USB cradle? John When it restarted, it reported a missing component. I recently ran a free trial of a PC tune-up utility, including a disk clean-up routine, on my Windows 10 laptop.

Windows 10 not booting from usb