Hello-
I have a Lenovo thinkpad A485 laptop. Yesterday it froze and wouldn't respond to ctrl-alt-dlt so I hard restarted it with the power button. When it turned back on, it went through the Lenovo screen like normal, but instead of loading the login screen, it loads a blank screen with the date and time. If I click on the screen, the date/time goes away and I get 3 small icons (wifi, accessibility, and power) down on the bottom right. From here, I can hit the windows key + i to make my profile picture appear. A spinny loading symbol appears underneath it (where the login box should be), but it just spins for awhile and then eventually goes back to the original date/time screen . I've read through some of the help posts from users with a similar problem. People have suggested:
-shift + restart (this makes my computer freeze)
-restart or power off/on + f8 (either freezes or just brings me to the same stuck screen)
-hard restart, either 3x or repeatedly (same stuck screen)
-sleep (computer goes to sleep but can only be awakened via hard restart)
The only other thing I can do is hit enter to interrupt normal start-up during the Lenovo screen. I then get a menu with several different options including "run hardware diagnostics" (it passed all the tests it ran) and "enter the BIOS setup utility", which gives me many menus and sub-menus that I don't understand. The end goal of most of the earlier help posts was to enter safe mode (via the methods that didn't work for me). Can I enter safe mode through the menus I can access? How do I fix this?
Thanks for your help!