On booting from that stick you can restore your Windows backup images. If you go to the 'Windows 7' backup section in your control panel there is an option in there to make a recovery USB stick.

Not as good as proper QA, but better than the current approach of 'do what you feel'.

Something MS could do is introduce a short online QA training package for potential insiders, which they must pass before being permitted to join. Hence the huge outcry about W10 being a mess in the news at the moment. This outsourcing testing to 'insiders' in the general public would be a nice extra in combination with proper QA, but they are just not picking up the issues in time like the old QA approach did and so relying so heavily on insiders is proving flaky. I still think we were better off when MS used to have a proper QA department. I have worked around most things now, but many of the bugs are still present in the OS and need proper fixing. A lot of them due to the fact MS have been messing around with the boot and security processes in this update. It did work straight away on some of my devices, but on others it has caused complete mayhem due to the introduction of a selection of interesting bugs. I know, pretty annoying, but that's the AU for you. Not saying I can help, but is it possible you use hardware based Bitlocker encryption on your boot drive? If so, I may be able to lend a hand. What do I do, Microsoft? :angry::angry::angry::angry::angry::angry::angry::angry: I have a backup HDD but can't do anything with it. What can I do as I can't get into the Windows OS to try any of the fixes I've seen on this forum. I can't enter any DOS commands on the line, all it does is loop back to the statement. AGAIN, it went to the black screen above with the same stupid statement. I did the CTL-ALT-DELETE again, and this time I pressed the F12 key for boot devices. Of course, you can't do anything in there except see how the system is set up. I tried CTL-ALT-DELETE and it got me into my Gateway system window. I rebooted and got the same statement again. Went downstairs and when I came back, the screen was black with this DOS statement: 'Reboot and Select Boot Device, or Insert Boot Media in Select Boot Device and Press a Key' I was able to log on, and watched the Get Started AU info. This morning when I went to log on, there was a notice about AU being installed.

Win10 backup and restore