Solved Windows hung after login after Windows Update

This morning I went to reboot my Win11 PC and it indicated it is going to do a Microsoft Update. It showed a percentage of progress and soon the screen went blank and it rebooted to the login screen. I logged in normally but after that the screen went black except for the mouse cursor with a small blue spinning circle attached to the cursor.

After a considerable length of time an error window popped up and said something about a OneDrive error. It is a local machine and I don't even have OneDrive. It restarted on its own and the error went away but the machine still gets hung after the login with a black screen and the mouse cursor.

I booted a Win11 install USB stick and tried several options, none of which worked.

I tried ctl, alt, del while on the black screen and I selected the task manager. I saw nothing unusual as far as tasks to "end" so I selected the "Startup Apps" on the display list. I saw an entry for "OneDrive.exe and it was enabled. I disabled it since the original error screen indicated it was part of the issue. It did not help.

At one of the subsequent reboots a window popped up that Avira was updating (right off to the side on the black screen). Another reboot indicated the Avira update had completed. I fear the Avira update taking place at the same time as the Windows Update is what caused the original corruption.

I booted from the Win11 install USB again and tried to get to the startup files to enter safe mode but the selections did not include the ones shown in this forum. I also cannot find a way to reinstall Windows without losing all my data like the Geek Squad would do.

After the black screen is up for about 10 minutes I now got an error with the OK button is flashing as if it is getting the error repeatedly. The error says "The operating system is not presently configured to run this application".

Any thoughts?

If you have an image of your system, use your imaging app's recovery disk to restore the image.

If you have no image, first attempt a system restore using the recovery environment.
Restart computer and immediately hold down shift key. Keep it held throughout boot until the Recovery Screen appears Troubleshoot > Advanced options >
System Restore. Choose a restore point from the list, click Next, and then click Finish to begin the restore process, which will restart your computer.
Note: If you are unable to get into recovery environment this way, you can boot from a windows installation disk and choose "Repair your computer" to enter the recovery environment.

If system restore fails to complete and/or does not get you working again, you can attempt a reset and keep my files. Whether this will work or not depends on how your system is corrupted.
Restart and go into recovery environment as I listed above. This time select Troubleshoot menu, select Reset this PC and choose to "Keep my files"to begin the reset process.

glasskuter said:

If you have an image of your system, use your imaging app's recovery disk to restore the image.

Click to expand...

I was waiting for a reply with suggestions before using my 10 day old image of the OS disk. I've made a lot of changes since then so I was hesitant. I have tried several forms of repair/recovery short of the ones that announce they will erase data on the disk. That selection makes no sense to me. I could just reinstall if I didn't care about the data.

Anyway, I tried to boot up again this morning and something has changed slightly. As I described, the machine boots up and allows me to log in and then goes to a black screen with the mouse pointer only. This time I used ctl, alt, del and the list with the task manager comes up. I've been here before but this time I wanted to try your suggestion to restart and hold the shift key and I noticed the "restart" option was in the lower right corner. When I clicked on the restart, it went to a display with spinning dots in the center and under that it said "Updates are underway. Please keep your computer on.".

Eventually (~10 minutes) the machine rebooted itself and I thought I was out of the woods but it went back to the black screen after login again.

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I just tried restarting while holding the shift key down the whole time and it booted right back to the login screen and did not enter recovery.

I have another Win11 machine and I created a bootable recovery USB. I booted it and tried these things, none of which worked:
Startup Repair, Uninstall Updates, System Restore (none found), System Image recovery (none found).

The image I have was made from a backup program and it's starting to look like I will need to lose the 10 days of my work and pray this doesn't happen again when the older image tries to do the same Windows Update.

P.S. The "Recover from a drive" option (on the recovery USB) states it will remove all files and apps. What good is that?

Well, that didn't work. I gave up on the recovery attempts and decided to overwrite the drive with my most recent clone image.

Strangely, it hung the same way as before.

I did a reinstall of Win11 and when it was done I test booted and logged in a few times with no problem.

I then copied the clone image on top of it again and now it is working like it used to but I've lost 10 days of work (time since last backup).

I also paused Windows Updates for two weeks and set up a reminder to do several full backups before Microsoft (perhaps) updates me into oblivion again.

Funny, I bought a new machine because Microsoft was ending Win10 support and my Win10 machine is not acceptable to upgrade.

I'm guessing (hoping) this problem was just a fluke of the anti-virus program trying to update on the reboot while Microsoft decided to update at the same time but I may never know.

glasskuter said:

Restart and go into recovery environment as I listed above. This time select Troubleshoot menu, select Reset this PC and choose to "Keep my files"to begin the reset process.

Click to expand...

Sadly or strangely, no restart or recovery attempts offered me a reset that would let me "Keep my files".

Thank the god of computers for backups.

BigRich said:

Thank the god of computers for backups.

Click to expand...

Good that you were smart enough to make one. So many folks do not. In the broad scheme of things 10 days of data is minimum compared to losing everything.

glasskuter said:

Good that you were smart enough to make one. So many folks do not. In the broad scheme of things 10 days of data is minimum compared to losing everything.

Click to expand...

I actually always make two backups. A friend of mine (and computer repair engineer) always made one backup and his backup failed in the middle and corrupted both the original and the target drive. With two backups you only need to get the first one and from then on you always have a safety net to your safety net.

Thank you for your suggestions and recommendations.