Windows 10: Cortana just disappeared!

I'm still having trouble with Cortana and the Search box. I used HP's maintenance program to Restore to an earlier time but no help. I still get a critical error when I left-click on the start button but I can right-click and get to some of the options.

 

Try the switch in Action Center:

 

Thanks. Haven't noticed that button before, but sadly, it's greyed out also. *Mad I suspect this may be the reason Cortana isn't playing ball.

Must be a reason behind all this - hope it's a simple fix.

Cliff

 

Something I have saved in a file for undetermined problems like this:

You can fix Windows files by copy & pasting in an Admin Command Prompt:

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup&sfc/scannow&Dism/Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth&sfc/scannow&pause

And let it run through then
reboot and run it again to check if it cleaned everything. It
may take awhile depending on your hardware(HDD or SSD), and it may
appear to freeze at 20% on the third part, just be patient and
let in run out.

 

Many thanks. Running it now, so fingers crossed.

Cliff

 

Just finished running and re-booted for first time, and no success I'm afraid. I will run it a 2nd time as you suggest in the morning.

Whilst waiting for the command line to do it's thing, I was having a look in Services.msc and noticed that "Geolocation" was disabled. Not sure if this has any relevance, but tried to enable it and it said "required file not found" (or similar).

When I get a chance later tomorrow, I will check this against our laptop, which so far has a fully working Cortana.

Thanks for all your help in the meantime, and I'll report back later tomorrow.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

Good morning!(I just got up) Good idea, you can look in the properties and see what dependencies it has and may another has been changed/turned off.

 

I bet it's back by the new year.

 

Ok, Hope never dies... but the Control Panel will!

 

Thanks for this. Sadly I have to gout this morning (Grrr), but will have a good look this afternoon.

Thanks again,

Cliff

 

You're very welcome, and it's good to be able to "talk" to another Cliff, as we have a rare name*Smile.

 

We do indeed - though I often get called Chris, or sometimes Clive!

Anyhow, the good news - my PC is fixed! *Smile*Smile*Smile

The issue was indeed the location services as you had mentioned earlier. I had a play with my wifes laptop and found that her "Geolocation service" was running fine. I disabled the service to see what effect it would have, but then discovered that I could not re-enable it (Opps!). It produced the same error message as I was getting on my desktop pc (cannot find specified file). A bit of Googling took me to an MS support site, which said this was a known issue with Win 10:

"GeolocationAfter disabling the Geolocation Service by changing startup type to Disabled, attempts to re-enable it will fail with an error message. As the Geolocation Service can no longer be started, Geolocation will remain disabled on the device and prevent location based functionality from working. To work around this issue, manually delete the following regkey using regedit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lfsvc\TriggerInfo\3."

I edited the registry as described, and sure enough, the Geolocation service could then be started. I opened MS Config, and made sure it was set to run at startup, re-booted, and after a restart, my "Location" button was live, along with an all singing and dancing Cortana. *Smile

Many thanks for all your help with this. I would never have got it sorted had you not pointed me in the direction of the location service, as I had assumed that the location service was aimed at tablets with a GPS chip! *Redface

Cheers,

Cliff

 

Ive with this one: Review, capture, flag download and locate "enable cortana.reg" and click ok until dialog box continued asks for consent disappears. sign out, back in, done. For me, this solved it.

the event viewer is just madness though. ‪cortana fix ‬‏ - Google Drive