Can my laptop be salvaged or is it beyond hope

Factual Questions
1

So yesterday it worked fine. But I think plugging the HDMI cable in to watch a movie on TV did something. When I did that it made some weird beeping noises I’ve never heard. After I finished watching a movie I unplugged the HDMI cable and went to bed.

When I got up I noticed my laptop still worked but I had no internet connection. The internet itself works fine because all my other devices work. I tried network troubleshooter, I tried restarting, I plugged a network adapter into the USB port, I even tried plugging an ethernet cable from the modem to the laptop. None seemed to give me internet.

Soooo in desperation I tried to do a system restore to a restore point a few days ago. When I did that, the system restore implied it wanted to totally wipe my hard drive and reset it to factory settings (not just restore to an earlier point). I cancelled out of that by pressing the cancel button (I didn’t just restart it, I used the cancel buttons).

Now I’m stuck in a blue screen of death loop. The PC will start up, show the Dell sign, then it’ll go to the blue screen of death. Then restart, go to the dell sign and the blue screen of death. I’m on Windows 10.

The screen has this error code: 0xc000021a

I read online, if you restart 3 times while it shows the windows sign, it’ll open in safe mode. But I can’t do that, it goes from the DELL logo to the blue screen of death, then restarts again. I tried restarting it during the DELL screen three times and that did nothing.

So what do now?

2

Have you gone through Window’s doc for troubleshooting blue screen errors?

ETA ugh, that stupid page uses the same method to get into safe mode. Here’s 8 other ways to boot win 10 into safe mode. Sorry, I don’t use Windows outside of work, and I just have them restore my system and restore my data from backup if it screws up.

3

You need to run Windows recovery from an bootable disc or flash drive and choose Repair Windows. If you don’t have a bootable image, you can download a Windows .iso and create a boot disc here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

4

Possibly, the application you were using to watch the DVD with is the culprit as this link is pointing to third-party software:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-0xc000021a--status-system-process-terminated

My guess is that the unplugging threw an exception somehow.

5

What kinds of backups do you have?

6

Do you have any wireless dongles plugged into the laptop’s USB ports? My wife’s computer had an issue where the Logitech wireless mouse / keyboard dongle caused an issue similar to what you’re seeing.

If this is the case, remove the dongle and see if you can reboot. If this works, see if a newer driver or software bundle is available for your wireless peripheral. If you’re lucky the problem could be resolved by a simple update.

7

I tried that (I also have a wireless Logitech mouse/keyboard combo) and when I restarted the PC it led me back to the system restore page which tried to reinstall windows 10.

I said fuck it and just reinstalled windows 10. Most of the important documents on that PC were transferred to an external hard drive a few months ago and I don’t trust myself to fix this problem (and I don’t want to spend the ~$200 or so I think it’d cost for a shop to do it).