Hello,
I am helping a friend with some issues on his PC (Windows 10 Lenovo thinkpad) encrypted with Mcafee disk encryption.
A few days ago we restored Windows to a system restore point because of some issues after some updates. I realize now this was probably a risky choice. When the system restore completed, he was able to enter the Mcafee drive encryption account and password to start booting the system, but it would freeze at boot, just showing a cursor on a black screen occasionally changing to a loading cursor and then back.
I was able to access the Windows startup repair screen (like here). We tried startup repair, which showed no issues. There are no longer any system restore points listed. We tried booting into safe mode, and safe mode with command prompt but both ended up stuck on the blank screen with a loading cursor.
Via the command prompt I ran the tool DISM (Cleanup-Image RestoreHealth) offline, and the tool SFC offline, both of which ran successfully and didn't detect any issues.
From the command line I also looked again for system restore images, but for some reason couldn't find any. I was eventually able to read out some of the windows event logs with just a few events for errors starting some services: "The dependency service or group failed to start" and for the "AFD" service: "A device attached to the system is not functioning".
It seems as if the installed disk encryption isn't an issue, but something went wrong with the windows System Restore?
My question is whether or not something may have gone wrong with the disk encryption which the DETech tool could help? If not, the next option for us is to reset or reinstall Windows. How would we go about this with the mcafee disk encryption installed? Will the reset option from Windows startup repair conflict with disk encryption?
Thanks,
Matthew
