Never thought the day would come where I could actually post on here, but here I am, sitting on my chair at 1 AM in the morning reconsidering my life choices.
So I have this laptop, an entry-level MSI that I got as a gift 3 years ago. It’s been very reliable for the most part, and despite one of the USB ports failing and some of the keys being unusable over time, I could still get shit done and that was what really mattered.
That, unfortunately, changed today.
I was attempting a stream on Discord, however I soon realised that for whatever reason, my CPU usage would just spike at insanely high rates. Believing it to be a driver issue, I got Windows to update all the drivers, believing that would fix the issue.
Then, for the first time ever, the laptop BSOD’d.
And then it happened again.
And again.
I did some digging based on the error code displayed and found that the Realtek audio drivers were fucked. I went into Safe Mode and uninstalled the driver. But when I went to scan for hardware changes, my laptop BSOD’d again.
Desperate, I decided to try the System Restore function, hoping that it would remove the driver I had reinstalled.
But then the System Restore failed. And when I tried to boot up the laptop again, it simply refused to go past the blue screen, and this time, there wasn’t even an error code displaying the Realtek audio driver anymore.
I consulted some fellows on Discord, and thankfully one of my friend’s bro happened to be a tech guy and we went back and forth in CMD trying to access Device Manager. Nothing worked, unfortunately, so we were about to give up.
Then, I remembered that the Startup Repair tool had a crash log that I could access via Notepad. This was when me and the tech guy saw a glimmer of hope. Perhaps the repair log could shed some light on what’s wrong?
I proceeded to slowly screenshot the crash log so the guy could figure out what was going on.
Then he said this:
If you have received this warning on your PC, it means that there was a malfunction in your system operation. Error code "error code 0x0" is one of the issues that users may get as a result of incorrect or failed installation or uninstallation of software that may have left invalid entries in system elements.
every error was 0x0.
It was then that we finally had a proper answer to my problems:
The System Restore failure wasn’t just a failure.
It also wiped out the entire system32 folder in the process.
I fucked up fellas. A meme that I once thought would never happen to me, happened in the most idiotic way possible.
So now I’m resetting my laptop at 1 in the morning. Wondering how I was going to explain how everything was fixed overnight.
My parents don’t know I stay up almost every night for the past 4 years.
Fuck.
TL;DR Realtek went brrr, laptop is kill, System Restore fucked system32, must now reset laptop, need to explain how that happened overnight to my parents
Don’t ever use the system restore over a fucking driver issue, folks.
UPDATE: It’s 11am, and I’m still reeling from the consequences. However my mom asked nothing about how I got my laptop working again so all is well.