[SOLVED] Windows 8.1 Laptop will no longer boot after attempting to upgrade to Windows 10

superfish92

Commendable
Jan 18, 2017
2
0
1,520
Sorry if this is kind of a long story I just want to have all the details there so someone can maybe tell me where I screwed up.

So my brother asked me to fix his laptop because it was being weird and slow. I look at it and it's infected with tons of virus' and malware. The hard drive was 28% fragmented. I decided to just go into recovery and have the laptop reset back to factory default and delete everything that was on it then see how it looked after that.

After that was finished it I defragged that hard drive, and it all seemed to be in working order, so I decided I'd go ahead and upgrade him from 8.1 to windows 10. The update is going well until the second time it rebooted itself during the update. At that point it just sat on the HP logo screen. No loading icon or anything, just frozen on that screen. I let it sit around for maybe 2 hours just to be double sure it wasn't simply being slow.

At that point I shut the computer down and turned it back on. It reinstalled the previous version of windows and everything was fine. I tried to upgrade it one more time, and once again it got stuck on the HP screen. After giving it some time once again I rebooted it, but this time it was just stuck on the HP screen, it didn't try to roll back to the previous version of windows. After trying to boot it a few times I turned it on and off quickly to get into the advanced recovery options. From there I choose to reset it to factory default again. At about 40% during this process it rebooted itself, said there was an error installing windows. It then reboots, goes to the HP screen, gives me a "preparing" message for a minute then again tells me "windows could not complete the installation. To install windows on this computer restart the installation."

If I click okay it just boots up again, then gives me that same message. I can no longer even get into the recovery options during the boot process. The only things I can do now are open the start up check menu and the bios menu.

I thought maybe I could get windows 10 on a USB from my computer and boot into the USB on the laptop to try and install windows that way. I followed the instructions to create a bootable USB with windows 10 install files on it.

Even though I have the USB set to boot first the laptop still just goes into the same screen where it tells me windows failed to install and that I need to try again, and I'm just stuck in that loop.

Does anyone have any clue as to what I can do here?
 
Solution
So after putting the BIOS into legacy mode I realized I now had the ability to press F11 and enter the recovery options. From there I was able to once again set the computer into factory default mode, and it was successful.

superfish92

Commendable
Jan 18, 2017
2
0
1,520
So after putting the BIOS into legacy mode I realized I now had the ability to press F11 and enter the recovery options. From there I was able to once again set the computer into factory default mode, and it was successful.
 
Solution