Software download locked down my computer

I tried to download the Version 2 software from sdr-radio.com today and it completely froze and locked down my Desktop computer running Windows 10. It cannot repair itself or recover. I cannot get into Windows in any way to do a system restore to a previous date.

Anyone else have this problem? Anyone have any ideas how to solve it?

What is the link you downloaded it from? What operating system are you running? What anti-virus software are you running?

iMONITOR said:

What is the link you downloaded it from? What operating system are you running? What anti-virus software are you running?

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I don't remember the link but I was on the sdr-radio.com software page and clicked on the gray download button directly below the Version 2 description.

I was running Avast anti virus and Windows 10. I cannot get back into Windows in any shape, form or description. To top it all off I found out today that my backup hard drive hasn't been working in about 6 months. I've lost ton's of Word and Excel files that I'm going to have to attempt to reconstruct manually. It's going to take days.

twotoejoe said:

I don't remember the link but I was on the sdr-radio.com software page and clicked on the gray download button directly below the Version 2 description.

I was running Avast anti virus and Windows 10. I cannot get back into Windows in any shape, form or description. To top it all off I found out today that my backup hard drive hasn't been working in about 6 months. I've lost ton's of Word and Excel files that I'm going to have to attempt to reconstruct manually. It's going to take days.

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Do you have access to another computer you can put your drive in (or use an external USB drive enclosure) as a secondary drive to see if you can gain access to your files and copy them over? Make sure that computer doesn't have valuable data/files on it in case your drive was infected with a virus/malware.

Joe, depending on just what your computer says and what the problem is, there are some companies (I think EASE-US offhand) that have software which will recover the boot files on a "fried" Win10 installation and allow it to run again. Win10 apparently has some quirks that allow it to trash the boot files unrecoverably--but actually, very simple to recover if you know which files to manually correct.

I've had my @ss saved this way after a "normal" Win10 update trashed the computer beyond the ability to use the official recovery tools. Don't recall what it cost, but it was a money-back guarantee.

Windows 10 allows you to do a new installation while maintaining all your folders/files and applications. This providing your drive is not defective.

Windows 10 is the biggest virus ever . people should of saw this coming with MS doing their best to force it on you .

Chronic said:

Windows 10 is the biggest virus ever . people should of saw this coming with MS doing their best to force it on you .

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Apparently very few are having serious problems considering...

Windows 10 Now Installed On Over 700 Million Devices Worldwide
https://hothardware.com/news/windows-10-700-million-devices-worldwide

Department of Defense Is Finally Done with Windows 10 Transition
https://wccftech.com/dod-done-windows-10-transition/

"Windows 10 allows you to do a new installation while maintaining all your folders/files and applications. "
IF you have installation media, meaning a DVD, almost always. But if someone hasn't made a bootable disc (most vendors don't supply them any more) they may find out the downloadable ISO images from Microsoft do not always work. Win10 can fubar itself and then the ISOs won't even work. They'll "install" the new image--but fail to boot. This all apparently goes back to the same process where an ISO update image wipes out a machine because everything is right--except something in the boot files. My educated guess is that it has to do with how the partitions are enumerated on the boot drive, since Win10 seems to create them differently, especially if there had been a previous manufacturer's hidden backup partition present.
The third party tools that actually do fix this (quickly & painlessly) just aren't well known.

As for 700 million Win10 machines meaning anything? Yeah, well, that's the ONLY version of Windows that supports the newer hardware, so it is the ONLY version available on many machines. And since Win7 has already been tombstoned, few vendors want to bother selling it any more.

The newer CPUs, i/o subsystems, etc. are not supported in any version below Win10, so if you buy new hardware, the older OSes may not work with everything even if you have extra copies to install. That is the result of a simple decision by Microsoft to not waste money on writing drivers for an obsolete insecure OS. Or so they've said. In practice? They've done this before, when they dropped the Win9x OSes in favor of WinNT, allowing them to dedicate all their resource$ on one code base instead of two. Same thing here.

And they've done that with WinNT itself, dropping the "spaghetti code" of NT4/5 and pushing for a new clean code base in Vista.

And with all that resource dedicating, they still can't read and write their own boot files.

Rred said:

"Windows 10 allows you to do a new installation while maintaining all your folders/files and applications. "
IF you have installation media, meaning a DVD, almost always. But if someone hasn't made a bootable disc (most vendors don't supply them any more) they may find out the downloadable ISO images from Microsoft do not always work. Win10 can fubar itself and then the ISOs won't even work. They'll "install" the new image--but fail to boot. This all apparently goes back to the same process where an ISO update image wipes out a machine because everything is right--except something in the boot files. My educated guess is that it has to do with how the partitions are enumerated on the boot drive, since Win10 seems to create them differently, especially if there had been a previous manufacturer's hidden backup partition present.
The third party tools that actually do fix this (quickly & painlessly) just aren't well known.

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That's not been my experience at all. Between myself, and helping others, I've been involved in countless installations, upgrades, re-builds, etc. Things have worked as they should. Including with old legacy hardware up to and including high end Dell Precision Workstations.

I back up my systems in two different ways. A total image back up, which includes the OS and applications/programs and all files, stored on multiple drives, as well as a back up that includes files only. I also keep several generations in case any of those backups are infected or corrupted for what ever reason.

It is not the AVERAGE or typical experience, but it happens. And this is not the first time it has happened.

When NT4 was new, it became infamous for crashing and corrupting the system files if there was more than one primary partition. That's perfectly legal under DOS partitioning rules (which are real even if they are not readily found) and normally, there was one primary partition on each disk, especially when someone had added a new disk and just "moved other" the old one. Resulting in two disks, one primary partition on each. Under NT's "preferred" configuration, there should only be one primary partition, on the boot drive, period. MS took some flack for failing to support standard drive configurations.

I have experienced MS's own tech support repeatedly being unable to correct a Win10 "update crash" caused specifically by Win10 not recognizing legacy drive partitions, and seen the third-party software fix that with no problem. When boot management was still done with BOOT.INI and standard configuration files, it was just a matter of pointing the boot drive to 0 or 1 or 2, and if the new system was counting or ignoring legacy or hidden partitions--no problem, you just changed the drive number and told it where to boot from.

Win10? Nope. new and improved, kiss of death is lurking there.

I'm sure you've never been bitten by a rattlesnake. Nevertheless, they are known to be out there in the wild, and sometimes to bite folks.

Yeah, forty (four hundred?) million lines of code and there are sure to be some errors. But being unable to escalate internal support and address the issues, really never has been excusable.

We really don't know if Windows 10 was the problem. The O.P. installed some open source software. It could have been non compliant, a virus, malware from another source, who knows? We don't know what other apps were open at the time or what was running in the background. Not to mention, it could be as simple as a drive failure.

All of that certainly is possible. I'm just mentioning that if the boot files are corrupted, whether it is by malware or simply "bad installation", the last resort before trying to recreate files for a week is to get software that DOES check and fix the boot files, and see if it works. Often available either as trialware or money-back guarantee, so there's little to be lost by trying it.

Could just be a coincidental drive failure, but an incompetent programmer is much more common.

A lot depends if the system was configured for legacy BIOS or UEFI.

You may have a installed an incompatible driver. You should try to boot into safe mode (hit F8 repeatedly as you boot up) and go into the minimal configuration that will allow you to copy the files you want to save to a flash or portable drive. You can then try to do a repair using your original installation files. If that doesn't work, after you save all the files you want you can reload the factory image.

If you've enabled System Restore after booting up in safe mode you can select a restore point. Pick the one that was written just before your computer stopped working. That should put you back to where you were before all of this started. If you don't have System Restore enabled then this won't work. Just Google System Restore on Windows 10 if you need help on doing this.