Windows 10 Critical Process Died Loop after Update

[jeffr1992]

Hi there. Windows 10 performed an automatic update yesterday, which seems to have completely destroyed my installation, as I'm now getting a "CRITICAL PROCESS DIED" stop code whenever I try and boot up. I've tried every option in the advanced options menu, to no avail (although I can navigate around my PC's file system using the command prompt option, but that's about it). I was once able to get into safe mode, where I then disabled my discrete GPU (AMD Radeon HD 8970M) in the device manager, and this allowed me to then boot into Windows 10 normally using my onboard GPU. However, once I was in Windows 10 again, I foolishly decided that it would be a good idea to go back to the device manager and enable my discrete GPU. This caused my PC to hang completely, which then forced me to do a hard restart, and I'm now once again back at the critical process died loop.

So, it seems that the culprit could be a compatibility issue between my discrete GPU and the latest W10 update, but not being able to get into safe mode again (I've tried about 20 times), and not being able to disable my GPU in the BIOS, I'm at a bit of a loss. I'm hoping to not have to do a clean install as there's a lot of data that I would unfortunately lose in the process. Is there anything that I could do to remedy this problem, such as being able to disable the discrete GPU using the command prompt? Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Colif]

What model laptop is this? many of them have 2 choices of GPU in them, the one on CPU and the radeon that should only work in games.

have you thought to use CMD to copy all your files you want to rescue off device? you can type notepad and it opens notepad, then click file> open to get file explorer

i don't know if this works outside windows

Type devmgmt.msc.

that might open device manager or might not.

 

[jeffr1992]

Hi Colif, my laptop is a Clevo P150SM that I bought in 2013.

Thanks for that neat notepad trick, I've copied all the data I wanted over to an external HDD. However, I seem to have run into another problem when trying re-install Windows 10 from a bootable USB drive. In my BIOS, I've set the priority of the bootable USB to #1 (and saved changes), but it isn't being read when I start my laptop up. It is a USB 3.0 device and I was wondering if, even though I can see it as a boot option in the BIOS, USB 3.0 devices might not be readable before we boot into Windows 10. I've tried it on all my ports (2 USB 3.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 port) to no avail.

 

[Colif]

look in bios, its likely that secure boot is enabled, it will block you booting from the USB

USB 3 should work with win 10, if the bios is seeing it, win 10 has USB 3 drivers on the USB.