The situation is brought his lappy home thinking it would be a 2 min job for me to do windows updates here.
Never dreamt that Win10 would do its thing or kick in without at least advising me. I saw the installing Windows10 update message out of the corner of my eye and thought oooh crap and tried to back out of it, just like I did on my own PC. But Im not sure if I left it too late, or it had already hung at that point because it hanging for a while on the installing update (I'm not certain now when where it hung) but it definitely rebooted by itself, and at which point didnt come back up.
Windows told me it was having a problem loading and offered to restart using system restore. I tried that and it came back up offering to repair, but that failed. I stopped at the point when it offered recovery so hopefully data should be intact.
Im out all day tomorrow, and not near anything like PCworld.
Its not urgent urgent, I can possibly tell him that I didnt get chance to do it today as he knows how busy I am. I dont want to upset him yet.. or rather mum who is most likely to go mad, as some of those photos was from a trip to Aus the other year to see his sister.. and I know for sure he wont ever be going back.
Due to personal circumstances I no longer build PC's (I think Ive mentioned before that I cant do things like install CPU's as I have no strength in one hand and some of my fingers are numb) nor do have any of the other stuff I may many years ago have had access to. Tech hardware stuff is kept to a bare minimum really these days and I even struggled a bit to get that HDD out.
Yeah I know the importance of backups and although Ive told him before about backups he doesnt have anywhere to store. I think/thought I took a copy of the photos at some point and Ive dug out that USB stick I could/would have used at the time, but my PC isnt seeing anything on it. There is one another stick that the stuff could be on, but I cant find it atm despite turning everything upside down.
I would never have let it update to Win10 without doing a fresh backup, but it had started all on its own as soon as it connected to my wifi.
So first thing is to get data off.
Then I need to see if I can get it running again.
I was about to put it straight in my pc.. but cant get the side case off (stupid damn hand), so will see if a neighbour would do that for me at some point tomorrow.
---
ETA.. and not going to attempt more now as my own daily backups run at 1am