Trying to help a friend sort his laptop.
Trying to do the Win 10 upgrade installation and you come to your first sign in and that seems to go well but after it tries for a while to continue on, it throws the Critical Error “Start menu and Cortana not working, it will be fixed the next time you sign in.”
Nope. You just go through this loop again. He never gets to a desktop or anywhere to access anything. He would like to simply do a system restore to before the upgrade but can’t get to a place to do that. It seems like the install has never finished completely.
Any ideas?
Here is discussion at answers.microsoftdotcom. In particular, read SkipInDallas’s contribution of restarting in Safe Mode by pressing the F8 key. His situation seemed the same as your friend’s.
I called the 800 number for Microsoft help and they walked me through system restore. This is only a one time deal so you might want to consider not installing it.
Make sure your antivirus is turned off. Perhaps even uninstall it, then install W10, then re-install the antivirus.
Yes, I saw several reports that AVAST in particular seemed implicated in this. I had no problems in my upgrade from Win7, but I was using Microsoft Security Essentials, so it was unsurprising that it played well during the upgrade.
Hitting the F8 key during restart got us past the block!
Muchas gracias!!