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My brother handed me this nice little problem: after updating to windows 10 his laptop stopped having a functional search and start menu, while looking at this I asked him if he had a backup (of course not) so I tried to make one but every time I try to copy a significant number of files the copy breaks, this means that I cannot copy over large numbers of files at a time. I have already ran anti virus software and found 64 different viruses. So that might have something to do with the failed update, anybody got a good idea on how to proceed? I suspect that the operating system itself or the file system has taken damage (several infected files in the windows folder).
If this cannot be fixed is there an easy way to extract the serial keys from such a machine and use it to get another valid copy of windows? I guess I could always create a life linux USB and use that to get the files but that would require me to string together a working usb port again (currently damaged).
Thijser
Posted 2015-12-06T17:26:27.333
Reputation: 111
Possible duplicate of How can I remove malicious spyware, malware, adware, viruses, trojans or rootkits from my PC?
– DavidPostill – 2015-12-06T17:32:35.193I think I already got most of those, the problem is that there is damage to the operating system itself as several important files were damaged. – Thijser – 2015-12-06T17:36:12.550
"I think I already got most of those". If you are not sure wipe and reinstall. – DavidPostill – 2015-12-06T17:41:07.170
Alright but any good ideas on how to rescue the files? The usb port was damaged quite a while ago and I can no longer copy larger number of files. I need to restore part of the OS/file system (restoring a damaged USB port is also an option but much harder I think). wipe and reinstall only works when you aren't dealing with important information that has no backup. – Thijser – 2015-12-06T17:47:37.523
How do I recover lost/inacessible data from my storage device?. See the accepted answer. – DavidPostill – 2015-12-06T17:48:18.247