What a pain. Windows update was in some sort of never-ending loop it seemed and eventually the system refused to boot. I’m so glad I have an official USB drive with an official Windows 10 on it because if I didn’t I wouldn’t know what the hell to do to get the machine reinstalled. The USB drive has a really old version of Windows 10 on it but at least it got me started.
The first problem was getting the network card working. First time I have ever experienced Windows install not recognizing and installing a working network driver. Thankfully the intel card I have on the motherboard had a close enough driver in the Windows installer so that worked. Once you have that then it is a simple matter of hunting down drivers from the internet.
As usual, about two days later my machine is back in business. It is still a very annoying process to have to do. When my boot drive failed not too long ago I was hoping to avoid something like this process. And thankfully at that time, it worked. This time, it had nothing to do with hardware failure. Software update was failing. This reminds me that I need to be a bit more diligent with making restore points. This is not the first time Windows Update has borked a machine on me.