nny

Stupidly I hadn't checked the integrity of the system image i'd taken (won't make that mistake again). Booting in safe mode was exactly the same, black screen with cursor, couldn't run sfc /scannow and dism.exe failed to start. Even tried to restore svchost.exe from another machine but that copied but didn't help. All in all - build is toast.

Just thought I'd let you know, anti-ransomware detected svchost.exe and quarantined it. Foolishly I allowed it to reboot as requested and was left with an unbootable machine, the only solution being to reinstall the OS. I spoke to my friend to get a boot disk and he reported that it had done the same to hom a few weeks ago (just with diffrent parts of sys32) - obvs no logs as system unbootable.