Urgent help needed

[Angrboda]

Hey everyone,

I wondered if any of the local techies could help, because my laptop died this morning. We had an electrician round and he had to turn off the power, so whilst he did I was using the battery, but still plugged in, and as soon as he turned the power back on my laptop screen went black and can no longer boot, so my theory is that it was some sort of power surge that fried it or at least corrupted some files.

The worst thing is we can't do any of the recovery options (for Windows 10) because it won't accept my password, and I'm not entirely sure which password it is asking for ie my laptop was never set up with a local password but instead a number code (ie a 'PIN'), that PIN doesn't work, nor does my Microsoft Account password (ie tied to my Microsoft email account), and like I said, I've never set up any local password beyond that PIN, but typing nothing didn't work either. So if anyone knows exactly what password is required there, that would be very helpful.

We managed to boot using a Linux USB boot disk, just to at least see that the SSD seems to be okay, and backup some files, and to get into safe mode to try chkdsk and which reported lots of 'orphaned files'. I then tried System Restore, restoring to restore point three days ago, and that seems to have made things a hundred times worse; now it's just caught in a loop "attempting auto repair" and failing with stopcode c000021a, fatal system error, and now won't let anything boot from USB or let me into safe mode, or basically do anything else.

So any suggestions here would be awesome, and much appreciated, because I'm at my wit's end

First, before doing anything else, I would backup the SSD so that if things get worse, you can restore to where things are now. If you have an external hard disk, clone the main drive using disk cloning software. Then, if you have installation disks for your operating system, you can try performing what is known as an upgrade in place wherein you instruct it to install to the current Windows install. Though given how goofed up things sound, that might make matters worse (thus the advice to back up the SSD first). There are some free options available, but I haven't looked recently to see what is recommended. I think Acronis has a trial period, but you'd need to install that to another computer in order to make a rescue USB drive.