What do we do when this happens. Here's a guide:
- Don't restart or shutdown with the power button
- Let the circling dots finish preparing or restoring the computer, this might take up to half a day or the whole day
- When windows starts, uninstall the feature update that might have caused this:
- Start Menu > Settings > Update & Security > View update history > Uninstall updates
- Search for KB4541335 (current bad update as of this post)
- Right-click/double click it to open the uninstall option
If the computer is still on Windows 10 1903, keep it on that version as it is more stable and don't update to 1909 yet.
This has been tested on an Asus K75DE Laptop with A10-4600M processor, storage uses an ssd for the OS and a regular hard drive for data.
We had left the circling dots alone, and it started back up. When this happened again (after about three weeks) with the circling dots, the laptop was restarted with the power button, because it has been decided to install a different OS. This rendered the Data hard drive inaccessible.
We have posted this so that others won't repeat the same mistake, and help the community to be more resilient.