Computer Problem/Question

[Gman]

BG, who's the manufacturer of your PC and is it a desktop or laptop?

[Bailey Guns]

This has really got me baffled. I've tried a disk reformat...didn't work. Ends with an error message that it can't access certain files due to a explorer.exe problem. I've tried booting from a recovery disk and that didn't work...same error message. I've never seen anything like this...not that I'm an expert or anything.

Only thing I can do basically is online stuff.

[Bailey Guns]

It's a Dell desktop.

[Gman]

FWIW

[Bailey Guns]

^^ Tried it just now. Didn't work.

[Circuits]

Might be time to burn it to the ground and start over. I hope you've got a backup for your actual files you care about and want to restore to the disk afterwards.

Make a Win10 install image to a USB stick, and also get or make a live-cd/dvd/usb of a linux system rescue image. Both are pretty easy to do online these days.

Boot into the linux system rescue image, open a terminal and completely erase everything on the primary hard disk with this command: (presuming your primary hard disk shows up as 'sda')

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

That will completely zero every single sector on the drive, and it will show up as uninitialized (factory new) when you boot into the windows install USB. Install windows, your system will eventually come back up and get its digital license either from the TPM in the system or off the Microsoft servers over the interwebs.

[BushMasterBoy]

Have you tried this?

https://www.dell.com/support/article...indows?lang=en

[Bailey Guns]

I'll try the Dell support site first.

Well that's not gonna work because the computer won't recognize the USB flash drive that I want to download the recovery file to.

[Bailey Guns]

Problem solved. Finally.

I ordered a new computer.

I'll fiddle fart around with the old one after the new one arrives.

[Gman]

That's another way to do it.

Good luck with it.