I restarted my computer this morning via USB and in contrast to what was happening yesterday, it took no time at all to load up the Windows ISO etc. I went to repair options and it managed to do a startup repair scan! Seems like chkdsk on the (D:) drive cleared something up.

The startup repair was unable to do anything automatically, but it did find the root cause of the problem. Here is what the diagnosis found:

"A patch is preventing the system from starting.

Repair action: System files integrity check and repair
Result: Failed. Error Code = 0x490
Time Taken = 1196746ms"

All of the other tests were performed successfully.

It’s now prompting me to remove any devices and try restarting the pc. Should I do that, or go into advanced options and run more frst scans first?

DT