A simple way to transfer photos from your phone to Windows without installing anything on either

Mike S wrote:

Apologies, I didn't read that you'd gone through all of that. Good luck.

No problem. I appreciate the help, and the tribal record will show others
how to recover from a bricked MS Windows 10 Pro update.

Basically, you must first try all the viable options in the Windows
recovery console using the original HDD.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...tore_gui_1.jpg

Then you do all that again, using the absolute latest DVD ISO you can find,
and, if you can find the same DVD ISO as the OS that was bricked, you do it
a third time.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...dvd_repair.jpg

That's all that the Microsoft Technical Support people will do, so then you
bring it down to the local Microsoft Retail Store for them to try to fix.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...il_store_6.jpg

You leave it with them for a few days, where they will try to recover the
OS but if they can't they'll be glad to recover your data (which I didn't
have them do because I backed it up with Knoppix ahead of time).
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...il_store_7.jpg

They will back up your data to their servers or to any drive you give them,
if you want them to, but I can't imagine that they could /find/ your data,
so I'm sure if you trust them, you'll lose a lot.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...il_store_1.jpg

Anyway, they will fail but when I asked them what they did, they told me
they first ran diagnostics, then they tried the recovery console of the
boot drive, then the recovery console of the latest Windows Creator
edition, and then the recovery console of an older version of Windows 10
and then they ran bcdedit to try to fix the boot record.

It all failed but they said there's nothing wrong with the HDD or RAM or
motherboard so I picked up my desktop today and am using it now after
stopping off at Fryes to buy an SATA III cable and a molex-to-SATA adapter
for the power.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...a_cables_1.jpg

I had to simply move the SATA position 1 on the motherboard to the boot
drive, leaving SATA 2 on the motherboard connected to the DVD disc drive,
and then put the new SATAIII cable on SATA position 3 on the motherboard to
mount the old HDD, and everything booted up fine.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...e_system_2.jpg

I can "see" the old HDD, plus some debugging files the Microsoft store
geniuses left behind.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...ystem8f091.jpg

Where the issue is really closed except for me to try to write up the saga
so that the Windows tribal knowledge is updated with the lessons learned.

Basically, some of the lessons learned is:
1. Windows 10 Update bricks a lot of systems (at least one a day is handled
by the Microsoft retail store)
2. The solution first is to try every viable option in the recovery
console, and then try it with a new Windows 10 ISO and then with an old
Windows 10 ISO.
3. If that fails, then try to recover the boot records with bcdedit.

When/if that fails, you simply start over after backing up your data, where
you "should" be able to mount the HDD (I was able to) to save your data
with testdisk or knoppix or ddrescue or PhotoRec or Recuva, etc.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...t_device_1.jpg

In my case, it mounted just fine - although Knoppix gave some weird errors
but I'm not too worried because after buying SATA and power cables, I now
have two terabyte HDDs in my laptop.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...t_device_2.jpg