So far this week, I’ve had three different users looking down the barrel at a BSOD after they did exactly what I asked by running a once-weekly reboot.
Win 10 hasn’t given me a lot of BSOD problems, and most of them have been a simple reboot and things were done. But this sum’bitch right here is nasty as hell.
You’ll end up with an infinite restart loop after a benign reboot – this is your warning sign that this is going to hurt.
Let’s not muck about with why or how this happened (might be this). Here’s what to do:
- Go into restore and pick the latest point you can find. Thankfully restore only messes with installed programs anymore, so it’s easy enough to deal with anything lost after this step.
- At this point a domain machine will do the first fun thing, which is have a broken trust relationship, even if the restore point was from that same morning
- Log in with a local account
- Discover that, for no fucking reason at all that your local admin account is now a guest account
- Grab (or create if need be) a usb installer for Win 7/8/10 – all will work – and boot to that
- Use the Utilmon.exe replace trick (detailed in answer 2 here) and use that to enable the built-in administrator (or change the account type on the existing login)
- Sign in as administrator and give admin rights back to your other local account
- Unjoin the domain
- When that mysteriously fails, open Local Security and go to Local Policies -> User Rights Assignment and re-add your locals to the Back Up and Restore lists, which are now exclusively populated by de-coupled GUIDs
- Reboot, unjoin domain again, reboot, rejoin domain, reboot
- Drink. Heavily.
My second go at this went a lot easier than numbers 1 and 3, so you might get lucky and be able to skip a few steps. But don’t expect it.
Good luck, kids.