Anyone do residential support in Austin, Tx?

[HCHTech]

Have a client who just moved there - and has what appears to be a corrupted Windows install. Boots to black screen with mouse cursor. I can connect remotely to see the screen with RMM, but cannot do anything. Remote background to command line is similar. I can list directories and such, but can't run anything. Crash booting and running System restore worked once, but symptom returned a day later. Now system restore doesn't think that system protection is/was turned on for the c: drive. There are restore points to choose, but you cannot proceed with the actual restore. May be a drive problem, although I have the event logs and there is nothing exciting in there at all.

I'm out of things I can do remotely - time for hands on.

Computer was new in March of this year - Ryzen 7, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 6GB Discrete Graphics, Samsung 1TB NVMe drive for Windows, 4TB WD Black for storage (hobby = photography). Has backups to local USB drives.

Anyone?

 

[Porthos]

May be a drive problem, although I have the event logs and there is nothing exciting in there at all.

Hard to tell, Since you said RMM, What AV is on the computer?
I have had clients drive to San Antonio from Austin for service in the past.

 

[HCHTech]

It's enterprise BitDefender, through Solarwinds. Client is elderly, don't know about their ability to drive, but they do have family in the area. I'll check. Google maps says ~ an hour & twenty minutes.

 

[Porthos]

It's enterprise BitDefender

It could of botched a Windows upgrade/update.

Computer was new in March of this year

Name brand or custom?

 

[HCHTech]

Name brand or custom?

Custom, and I don't offer out-of-state onsite warranty - Trying to uninstall latest update or latest feature update from the advanced startup screen does not complete. "We were unable to uninstall. Try Resetting your PC instead." He is holding off doing that until someone local gets a look at it. Resetting would mean reinstalling Adobe Lightroom & illustrator, 2 printers, Office, etc.

I did do a remote to his daughter's phone so I could see with the camera. Had them reseat the graphics card, but nothing else looked out of place. They are going to try and find someone in Austin to take a look.

 

[Porthos]

Try Resetting your PC instead." He is holding off doing that until someone local gets a look at it. Resetting would mean reinstalling Adobe Lightroom & illustrator, 2 printers, Office, etc.

That probably would have been my solution after hardware tests. I suggest a proper imaging solution in place for the future like for example Macrium Reflect.

 

[britechguy]

I am unclear here as to whether you can boot into Windows 10 or not (even if it's unhappy, if it allows you to do anything that's enough).

In situations such as this I would always try doing a repair install with the ISO file before I'd consider a reset. There's nothing to lose in trying that if you can.

Doing a Windows 10 Repair Install or Feature Update Using the Windows 10 ISO file

Of course, if you've got bootable media, and the computer is in a condition such that you can get to the files via File Explorer, you can kick off setup.exe from there.