My son has a Lenovo laptop with Win 7 on it.
After leaving it on all day yesterday, discovered screen was just grey with a cursor in the middle. After I did my cursing and swearing at him and questioning him about what he has been doing, I set about doing a system restore.
This basically took me till tonight, eventually got it restored and working - decided this was a good time to both copy all his documents to external drive as well as go an image thingy.
Once I did that I did a full system scan and nothing detected. did CC Cleaner as well.
Once I did all that I then proceeded to install the 15 microsoft updates that it recommended and were critical. Tried doing this and eventually it said it had failed to install some but to restart now.
Once I did this I have ended up back at the grey screen with cursor!!
Aaaarrgghhh!!
So now needing to go through the whole system restore again at which point I will switch off microsoft updates!!
But anyone any idea why this is happening? Anyone in the industry know if there has been rogue updates or whatever?
My other concern is my own laptop is almost identical with, I think, most of the software the same but I don't seem to be having any issues?
Thoughts?
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Anyone tried this before?
support.microsoft.com/gp/windows-update-issues/en-gb
Looks like a good starter for ten?? ........ once I get the thing running again!
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I haven't had the grey screen lark but I have had a lot of failed updates of the many I applied over the last few days. I had to use the the troubleshooter multiple times before it reached the point of having none left to do. (Control Panel/System & Security/Find and Fix Problems/Fix Problems with Windows Update with Windows Update).
It's a current problem allegedly (the failed updates, not the grey screen).
I don't install automatically - I go for the "notifications" and do them a few at a time. When a chunk causes a problem, run the troubleshooter. Quite frustrating even without the restores, as there is a lot of rebooting.
Just done another 500MB of Office ones after loading that.
Last edited by: Manatee on Mon 26 Nov 12 at 23:16
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Ditch Windows if you can.... updates are needed for security. None of my Windows 7 machines (personal or work) have had problems updating though.
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Have just had "update" experience after putting SSDs in a laptop and desktop using clean installs with an early edition of Win7 - latest was 143 updates to the OS and Office'07, and I still haven't got to service pack 1! There are a couple of rogue updates which don't seem to like being installed as part of a batch and get flagged as "failed"; however it doesn't seem to cause any problems - they just have to be installed separately.
Last edited by: lancara on Tue 27 Nov 12 at 08:47
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>> and Office'07, and I still haven't got to service pack 1! There are a couple
>>
>>
AFAIK, MS service packs (in general) negate the need to install any prior updates. On the odd occasion that an update has to be installed prior to the current service pack, then that issue is flagged up in the list of "prerequisites".
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>> Ditch Windows if you can.... updates are needed for security.
Show me an O/S that does not have regular security updates and in return I'll show you one that's a disaster looking for a place to happen.
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Well a little update this morning - it won't let me do a system restore.
No matter which date of restore I select, it does its full attempt and then comes back with a message telling me an unspecified error occurred during system restore Ox8OOOffff
Also tried running the image recovery but even though I made one yesterday to my External disk drive, when I try doing this it is only picking up the image recovery for my own laptop that is on the EDD, not the one I did yesterday and it doesnt seem to let you browse the EDD.
Looks like its going to be another night in front of two laptops, trying to fix one whilst googling on the other!!
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Use the Lenovo recovery partition to rebuild it. You have go the data backed up havent you.
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How do I access that though?
Windows doesnt load and it goes straight to recovery which doesnt work.
Would I need to hit the F2 straight after switching on?
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One of the F keys at power up. Used to be f11, check which one at the very good Lenovo support pages.
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The error 0x80000FFF (note the 0's as it is hexadecimal) according to a quick Google affects Vista and is related to Windows updates. I know you have Windows 7 but then Windows Vista and 7 are both Windows 6.x.xxxx in reality. 7 and Vista are marketing versions. Windows XP was Windows 5.
Anyway Googling shows up some fixes for this error on Vista, e.g.
support.microsoft.com/kb/946414
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Cheers guys will have a look when I get home
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>> Also tried running the image recovery but even though I made one yesterday to my
>> External disk drive, when I try doing this it is only picking up the image
>> recovery for my own laptop that is on the EDD, not the one I did
>> yesterday and it doesnt seem to let you browse the EDD.
>>
"image recovery" - which software?
"picking up the image recovery for my own laptop that is on the EDD" - either move that one to another EDD, or move the "the one I did yesterday" to another EDD. Then try the image recovery again.
EDDs are dirt cheap at the moment.
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Just as an update (pardon the pun) no amount of restoring or file imaging or anything was working.
Then I discovered that on the Lenovo, next to the power button, is a small button that is used to enter recovery mode. This then allowed me to restore the computer back to initial ie out the box settings.
As I had managed to back up the files and folders on Sun to the EDD then this has worked out well. Now doing a full backup and hopefully that should be us sorted!!
Thank you all for the help, still p'eed off that this could happen in the first place due to MS Updates though but has been yet another learning curve for me !
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>> Then I discovered that on the Lenovo, next to the power button, is a small
>> button that is used to enter recovery mode. This then allowed me to restore the
>> computer back to initial ie out the box settings.
However, just for security purposes, you will need to install quite a few Windows updates as the Lenovo restore of Windows will probably be quite out of date?
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Here's a question - I now have an absolute pile of Updates going back to 2011 - they do not seem to be in any particular order and no way to sort them in date order.
So what is the best way to install these - would prefer to do maybe 3 or 4 at a time but could they end up conflicting if not done in correct order?
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>> could they end up conflicting if not done in correct order?
Not so much conflicting as missing a pre-requisite.
Why wouldn't you just let it get on with it?
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>> >> could they end up conflicting if not done in correct order?
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>> Not so much conflicting as missing a pre-requisite.
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>> Why wouldn't you just let it get on with it?
Just click the button and it all gets done, ok it takes time, but it works nearly 100% reliably on a new build.
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Just been through the exercise - they are numbered and if you click on the top of the title column they can be put in ascending or descending order. I did them 10 at a time (the fact I was installing on a SSD helped with quick restarts!), until I got to some that failed, then had to do one at time to get past that section. As previously noted - going straight to service pack 1 eliminates some, not all, of the earlier ones. Only recently found out you can right-click on an update to hide it (those pesky ones offering to install Bing bar and IE9).
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Service pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 came out in early 2011. So there will be a lot of patches since then that need to be installed. The ones you need (of which there will be lots) are the ones effecting security.
And don't forget things like Adobe Flash is full of holes and gets patched on a regular basis. The most recent patched version will be okay (for now).
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Is there a reason for doing them a bit at a time rather than just hitting the button?
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>> Is there a reason for doing them a bit at a time rather than just
>> hitting the button?
>>
I think he is trying to avoid getting in to the pickle he did as per the first post, and as per the title of the thread.
Last edited by: John H on Fri 30 Nov 12 at 10:13
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I went for the mass update with my new laptop last week but it reached a point where it kept failing. Even after running the find-and-fix. So then I started doing 10 at a time until it failed, run find-and-fix again, do five, etc. until I ended up with one outstanding. Find-and-fix just took it off the list!
With a re-image I'd start with the mass update, otherwise it'll take a weekend - there were hundreds of them and it already had Win 7 SP1.
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Microsoft Updates Killing Win 7 - BobbyG
