If your Windows 10 Installation suddenly starts giving you an error saying “critical error” Start menu and cortana aren’t working here is a workaround that fixes it for a lot of people.
This might not work for everyone but it does solve the problem for a lot of people.
Here are the steps,
- Press ctrl+alt+delete on your keyboard
- Click on “Task Manager”
- Click on the “File” menu in the top left
- Click on “Run new task”
- Type in MSCONFIG
- Click OK
- Click on Boot Tab
- On the bottom will be a section called Boot Options, check “safe boot” and select “network”
- Click “OK”
- Restart your computer
- When it is rebooted and you get on the safe mode desktop, press ctrl+alt+del again
- Click on “Task Manager”
- Click on the “File” menu in the top left
- Click on “Run new task”
- Type in MSCONFIG
- Click OK
- Click on Boot Tab
- On the bottom will be a section called Boot Options, check “safe boot” and select “network”
- Click “OK”
- Restart your computer
Basically your are booting to safe mode with networking and then rebooting normally. For some reason this works for a lot of people.
When I tried this on a system that was giving the error I noticed that during the boot into safe mode, windows rolled back a failed update. I don’t know if this is what fixed the problem or not but it is the only thing that I noticed windows doing during the procedure. It fixed the problem for me so hopefully this will help someone else as well.