The easiest ways to restore Windows in case of failure

Sure­ly many of our read­ers are famil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion when Win­dows refus­es to work. In this case, you should restore the oper­at­ing sys­tem. But how to do it?

Is the problem hardware?

Restor­ing Win­dows will only work if every­thing is fine with your hard­ware. And often the oper­at­ing sys­tem refus­es to work sta­bly pre­cise­ly because, for exam­ple, a hard dri­ve has begun to fail. There­fore, the first thing we rec­om­mend is to find out that you do not have any prob­lems with the com­put­er com­po­nents. If the OS boots for a while, and only then, for exam­ple, the blue screen of death appears, you can eas­i­ly do this by installing one or anoth­er pro­gram that is used to diag­nose a PC. In par­tic­u­lar, we rec­om­mend:

1. 
   Memtest86+ — to check the RAM;

2. 
   Hard Disk Sen­tinel — to test the hard dri­ve;

3. 
   AIDA64 — for a com­pre­hen­sive check of the PC.

You can also use the built-in Win­dows RAM test­ing util­i­ty — to run it, type “mdsched.exe” (with­out quotes) on the com­mand line.

If the oper­at­ing sys­tem refus­es to start, you can use a bootable flash dri­ve, which should con­tain not only the dis­tri­b­u­tion kit of the sys­tem, but also Win­dows To Go. In some cas­es, the com­put­er does not allow you to down­load any­thing at all — then try to leave only one bar of RAM in the sys­tem unit. You can also test your com­po­nents on anoth­er PC, if avail­able. In a word, you def­i­nite­ly need to make sure that the prob­lem is not in the failed hard­ware. And only after that you should pro­ceed to restore the OS.

Using a restore point

The eas­i­est way to get Win­dows back up and run­ning is to roll back to a restore point. This means that the oper­at­ing sys­tem will return to the state that was fixed at the time the select­ed restore point was cre­at­ed. If any soft­ware was installed after the cre­ation of this point, there will not be a sin­gle trace of it on the com­put­er. If at that moment the sys­tem worked prop­er­ly, then now it will func­tion with­out any fail­ures.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some users are try­ing in every pos­si­ble way to free up space on their hard dri­ve. Because of this, they stop the func­tion of cre­at­ing restore points. In this case, it will not be pos­si­ble to restore the func­tion­al­i­ty of Win­dows in this way.

If the oper­at­ing sys­tem boots, then you can access the avail­able restore points by doing the fol­low­ing:

1. Press the key com­bi­na­tion Win+R.

2. Type “Sysdm.cpl” into the com­mand line (with­out quotes). After that, do not for­get to press the Enter key.

3. In the win­dow that opens, you need to go to the “Sys­tem Pro­tec­tion” tab. Here you need to click on the “Restore” but­ton.

That’s all. Then fol­low the instruc­tions of the sys­tem. Along the way, the com­put­er will restart — there is noth­ing to wor­ry about, as it should be.

You can also use restore points using the already men­tioned bootable USB flash dri­ve. But only if the file sys­tem on the hard dri­ve is not bro­ken!

Restarting the System in Diagnostic Mode

If the oper­at­ing sys­tem boots, but there are some prob­lems with it, you can try to remove the soft­ware that you sus­pect of their appear­ance. How­ev­er, some appli­ca­tions pen­e­trate deep into Win­dows, which makes their removal seem impos­si­ble. In this case, you need to start the OS in diag­nos­tic mode. It only runs the basic Win­dows dri­vers and ser­vices. To do this, you need to do the fol­low­ing:

1. Press the key com­bi­na­tion Win+R.

2. Enter the com­mand “mscon­fig” (with­out quotes). Don’t for­get to press the Enter key.

3. In the win­dow that opens, you need to select the “Diag­nos­tic start­up” item and click the “OK” but­ton.

After that, the com­put­er will restart so that the sys­tem switch­es to a new mode of oper­a­tion. If Win­dows refus­es to do this, try run­ning the com­mand prompt as an admin­is­tra­tor.

Removing unnecessary software from startup

Some­times you just have to guess about why Win­dows sud­den­ly restarts. For many peo­ple, this is caused by installing soft­ware that is not suit­able for this ver­sion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Or which is crooked­ly writ­ten, it hap­pens. That is why we rec­om­mend remov­ing all sus­pi­cious pro­grams from start­up. This sec­tion of the sys­tem includes appli­ca­tions that start simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with Win­dows. If you clean it, you will also speed up the down­load. And the com­put­er will not slow down in the first min­utes of its work.

To view autoload, you just need to get into the “Task Man­ag­er”. To do this, use the well-known key­board short­cut Ctrl+Alt+Del. In the win­dow that opens, you can eas­i­ly find the “Start­up” tab. Remove from this sec­tion all pro­grams that you sus­pect of sys­tem insta­bil­i­ty. Most of all, this applies to appli­ca­tions reg­is­tered in start­up with­out your knowl­edge.

Removing software that was in use at the time of the crash

If the steps above do not help and you can­not use a restore point, you should do a lit­tle inves­ti­ga­tion. Try to iden­ti­fy the appli­ca­tion you were using at the time of the crash. It is pos­si­ble that it is he who is to blame for all the trou­bles.

Using stan­dard Win­dows tools, you will def­i­nite­ly not be able to find out which pro­grams were run­ning when a prob­lem occurred. But it will allow you to do a free util­i­ty
Las­tAc­tiv­i­tyView. It shows a list of recent­ly launched appli­ca­tions and even sys­tem libraries. Fur­ther, you should only focus on the time at which the prob­lems appeared. If you begin to sus­pect some kind of pro­gram, then feel free to delete it. If it has noth­ing to do with it, you can eas­i­ly rein­stall it — it does not take too much time.

Checking your computer for viruses

Usu­al­ly, all sorts of mali­cious appli­ca­tions try to be qui­et so that their dirty tricks are not notice­able to the user. But some virus­es change sys­tem files so much that Win­dows starts to hang and crash. There­fore, we still rec­om­mend that you check your PC for mali­cious appli­ca­tions.

We have already talked more than once about which antivirus­es you should use. If you do not want to pay mon­ey, you can use an online anti-virus check. How­ev­er, if fail­ures occur com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed­ly, or the oper­at­ing sys­tem does not load at all, you will have to use an atyp­i­cal method. You will need a boot disk (or USB flash dri­ve) with antivirus soft­ware. Such things are avail­able in the assort­ment of any self-respect­ing com­pa­ny work­ing in the field of infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty. For exam­ple, you can use
Kasper­sky Res­cue Disk 18. I am glad that they will not ask you for mon­ey for using such soft­ware.

Do not for­get that the ISO image with the soft­ware pack­age must be cor­rect­ly burned to a disc or USB dri­ve. This can be done using, for exam­ple, a free appli­ca­tion
Rufus. If Win­dows does not boot, you will have to do this using anoth­er com­put­er.

Check for problematic drivers

It is pos­si­ble that the oper­at­ing sys­tem crash­es due to one or anoth­er prob­lem­at­ic dri­ver. This hap­pens quite rarely, but the pos­si­bil­i­ty of this still can­not be ruled out. Prob­lems with soft­ware arise even on game con­soles. What can I say, once Sam­sung sent the wrong firmware to their blu-ray play­ers, com­plete­ly killing them. Now you under­stand that a crooked­ly writ­ten dri­ver for a sound card or gamepad is not some­thing out of the ordi­nary. There­fore, you can try to scan the dri­vers for their sta­ble per­for­mance and the absence of con­flicts. To do this, you must launch the com­mand prompt, doing so with admin­is­tra­tor rights. The con­sole requires the launch of the verifer.exe util­i­ty, which is part of the oper­at­ing sys­tem — it is she who checks the dri­vers. Work­ing in it is quite sim­ple, since the inter­face is made in Euro­pean. But act care­ful­ly — rash oper­a­tions can lead to seri­ous con­se­quences.

If some dri­vers are real­ly prob­lem­at­ic, you need to urgent­ly update them. Doing it man­u­al­ly would be too much of a has­sle. There­fore, we advise you to down­load and install the appro­pri­ate soft­ware. For exam­ple, it could be
dri­ver boost­er or
dri­ver­hub. These pro­grams are able to auto­mat­i­cal­ly check from time to time for new dri­vers. This means that you will not have a headache about updat­ing them reg­u­lar­ly.

If we talk about the video card, then the dri­ver for it is installed using the appro­pri­ate launch­er. Its pres­ence will also pro­vide you with all sorts of addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty — for exam­ple, the abil­i­ty to cre­ate panoram­ic screen­shots. To view the launch­er, just click on the arrow in the tray (next to the clock and date), and then click on the cor­re­spond­ing icon (it can be, for exam­ple, NVIDIA Expe­ri­ence). Do not be afraid that this pro­gram sud­den­ly began to be updat­ed — this hap­pens if you have not opened it for a long time.

Removing Recently Installed Programs

Usu­al­ly, the user does not want to delete those appli­ca­tions that were installed most recent­ly. But if the fail­ures start­ed just a few hours ago, then the first thing to do is to do just that. In this case, there is no doubt that one of the installed pro­grams led to prob­lems. Espe­cial­ly if it is some kind of free antivirus that can dive very deep into the bow­els of the sys­tem.

Try unin­stalling any pro­grams you have installed in the last week. It is pos­si­ble that this will help restore the full per­for­mance of the sys­tem. But before that, you can go to the “Win­dows Jour­nal”. It indi­cates a list of errors that occur dur­ing the oper­a­tion of the OS. Usu­al­ly in the descrip­tion of these errors it is said about which pro­gram it is asso­ci­at­ed with. This will allow you to quick­ly find out the cul­prit of the fail­ures. To get to the cor­re­spond­ing sec­tion of the sys­tem, write the word “jour­nal” in the search bar “Start”. Next, you need to click on “View event log”. In the win­dow that opens, you will quick­ly find a sec­tion con­tain­ing all sorts of errors. If any of them is fatal, lead­ing to fail­ure, then try enter­ing its code into any online search engine. It is pos­si­ble that such an error is famil­iar to users, and some­one has already shared their expe­ri­ence in solv­ing the prob­lem.

Restoring Protected System Files

In some cas­es, Win­dows crash­es are caused by miss­ing or cor­rupt­ed sys­tem files. To check them, and at the same time restore them, you need to run the com­mand line. But not in the usu­al way, but by right-click­ing on it and click­ing on the “Run as admin­is­tra­tor” item.

In the con­sole, you need to run the sfc.exe util­i­ty by addi­tion­al­ly adding the /scannow key. This will start the process of scan­ning libraries, key Win­dows com­po­nents and all sys­tem files. If the lat­ter are found to be dam­aged or some files are miss­ing alto­geth­er, the util­i­ty will replace them with a cached copy from a sep­a­rate fold­er. If they are not in it either, you will be prompt­ed to insert an instal­la­tion disk or USB dri­ve with the sys­tem dis­tri­b­u­tion kit in order to restore files from there.

Memory dump analysis

https://www.thefastcode.com/en-usd/article/help-troubleshoot-the-blue-screen-of-death-with-bluescree…

If the oper­at­ing sys­tem reboots with the so-called blue screen of death, it will def­i­nite­ly give an error code. But you may not have time to write it down or take a pic­ture. A sim­i­lar code is writ­ten in a crash dump with the .dmp exten­sion — it is also cre­at­ed dur­ing a sud­den crash with­out any blue screen. You just have to get access to the dump. This can be done with­out much dif­fi­cul­ty. But only if you are a good pro­gram­mer.

If you are an ordi­nary user, then man­u­al­ly pars­ing dumps will not be the most fun thing to do. And it is unlike­ly that you will under­stand some­thing in their con­tents. There­fore, we rec­om­mend using a spe­cial­ized util­i­ty that sim­pli­fies the inter­face and also tells about the essence of some errors. We offer you MiniDumper and Blue­Screen­View to choose from. Both pro­grams are free and sup­port work from the com­mand line. The sec­ond, as you might guess, is more geared towards deci­pher­ing the blue screens of death.

Conclusion

Per­haps we have list­ed all the most sim­ple ways to restore Win­dows. If none of them helped, then you are faced with a very seri­ous sit­u­a­tion. It is pos­si­ble that noth­ing will help you. In this case, you will have to rein­stall the sys­tem.