Inspiron 15" 7559 running Windows 7 prevented from booting because of Windows Update KB3133977

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to let everybody know about a serious issue I encountered with several Dell Inspiron 15" 7559 laptops running Windows 7. I suspect this problem also applies to all Dell Inspiron 15" 7000 series laptops that are running Windows 7.

After running Windows Update early last week (around April 19, 2016), several of our Inspiron 7559 laptops would no longer boot. They wouldn't even boot into Safe Mode, and traditional recovery methods like System Restore and Startup Repair also failed completely. The only solution seemed to be to reinstall Windows.

Before I reinstalled Windows, I was able to extract the logs off of two machines using some recovery software. Pouring through the logs, I narrowed the problem down to about ten potential updates that could have caused this issue. After reinstalling Windows on one of the machines, I went through and installed each update one at a time and rebooted several times to see if the machine would continue working. The system finally failed when I encountered this update: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3133977)

So, please, unless you want your system to be rendered nonfunctional, please HIDE update KB3133977 and if you are in a corporate environment, have your IT people disable it completely from your Inspiron 15" 7000 series laptops until Dell and/or Microsoft can resolve this issue.

This issue involves BitLocker and FIPS--if you don't have FIPS enabled or don't know what it is/what it's for, this update probably doesn't even apply to you. KB3133977 is for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, so these are probably the only two operating systems affected (although I don't know why you'd run a server OS on a laptop).

This issue has taken up nearly a week of my time and I'm so glad to finally have figured out the problem. I hope this write-up helps somebody else who may be encountering this issue!

--sdo5532