During installation of the latest driver for my AMD Radeon graphics card my desktop blacked out and wouldn’t go anywhere. I did a hard shutdown and on startup I was presented with the Windows log and spinning ‘dots’ that kept going and going. It would not pass this stage:
Doing some Googling I came across various suggestions as to how to fix this (there is a variety of things that can cause it, from Windows 10 updates to other software update). Generally speaking it was to shut off your computer three times in a row while on this screen or hold the shift key while restarting. None of those worked for me. I had to do a true hard reset, cutting the power completely, by pulling power cord once presented with the screen above. You need to repeat this step until you see the following screen, ‘Preparing Automatic Repair’:
A blue window will then pop up, click Advanced options when the automatic repair screen comes up:
Then on the next screen click ‘Troubleshoot’:
The click ‘Advanced options’ again:
If you know what caused the issues, as I did since this started happening immediately after my attempt to update my graphics drivers, click Startup Settings:
Then on the next screen click Restart. Once it has restarted you’ll see a list of startup options and in order to get into safe mode you will click 4 to enable safe mode and you’ll see a simple version of Windows that’ll allow you to uninstall / undo what you did to cause your problem in the first place.
