Glad you figured that out. One thing I’ve always done is keep a couple flash drives handy with Linux live installs on them. They’re useful when a Windows install fails because they’re mostly functional and allow you to basically back door boot into your system, mount the Windows hard drive, and recover and backup files. It just requires learning basic linux commands and knowing how to install a small handful of software that doesn’t normally come pre-installed.
Was updating everything to the latest release of Joplin pretty smooth overall?