Dell XPS 12 Running Windows 8 X64 - Disk Checking Endless Loop
May 18, 2013
Dell XPS 12 running Windows 8 x64. Had it for about six weeks, and I had two problems I with it:
- every so often (maybe once a week), when I would turn it on, instead of booting into my normal startup screen, it would say 'Preparing Windows', then boot into, like, a generic account with none of my programs or files or anything... shutting down and restarting fixes that problem. A little annoying, but no big deal.
- every so often (maybe twice a week), I I'd shut it down, and I'd get the BSOD, with 'SESSION_HAS_VALID_POOL_ON_EXIT' given as the problem. I bit of Googling seemed to reveal that this was a fairly common issue with Wi8 on this particular machine, so I never worried too much about it.
I'm describing these problems because they might shed light on the NEWEST problem, which is as follows:
Did a Windows 8 update yesterday, and today I discovered that when I turn the machine on, I get 'To skip disk checking, press any key within 1 second' at the Dell startup screen... I didn't press anything, but it didn't seem to go into disk-check, booting normally into Windows instead. I tried to do a disk check, and right away, it told me 'Windows has found problems with your disk', telling me I had to restart to fix them... so I did, and got the same 'To skip disk checking...' message, followed by an immediate boot into Windows instead of any disk checking. I tried to do a system restore, thinking one of the updates might be causing the problem, but when I try to do a system restore, it tells me that I have to run check-disk first (but every time I do, I get the same routine I just described above).
My (12-year-old) son's computer won't boot. It's a Dell Inspiron 17" running Windows 8, bought from Costco in July 2013. When I turn it on, Dell logo comes on and then in upper left it says "Checking Media [fail]", then "checking media" again, then "No Boot Device Found. Press any key to reboot the machine". I insert a USB recovery drive (it was made for my Toshiba that runs Windows 8.1, but it should work anyway, right?).
I choose US keyboard layout and it then opens into Recovery Environment. I choose Troubleshoot → Refresh Your PC. Message appears "The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." I go to Troubleshoot → Startup Repair, which runs and then says "Startup Repair couldn't repair your PC." I then go back to Troubleshoot → Command Prompt and run chkdsk on Windows drive (c). It says "Windows has checked the file system and found no problems." Dell would probably tell me it's a hard drive failure and tell me to buy another one.
Windows Action Center displays this error: Restart to repair drive errors
We found errors on a drive. To repair these errors and prevent loss of data, restart your PC now. The repair could take a while to complete.
The restart completes (doing very rapid checks), and after a minute or so Action Center displays the same error again. This happens every time I start the computer. Sometimes the computer boots straight to the Start screen, and sometimes it boots to a blue screen with the option of sending a report to Microsoft before completing the boot. Sometimes it sends a report with no action required.
I have checked the hard drive using PC Checkup with MyDell, and with TuneUp Utilities, and no errors are reported. Using CHKDSK C: /f /r /x does not complete, but gets stuck at 13%.
I have also used chkdsk to check the two USB external drives that I use, and no errors are found.
When I run Check for Updates it just hangs. It says it is checking for updates and green progress bar is repeatedly running across, but nothing happens.
Before this problem arose I had just run disk clean-up including remove installation files and windows updates. The disk clean-up process removed about 59 GB including a large Windows.old folder.
I upgraded to Windows 8 from XP about 10 days ago. Windows update was working fine until the disk clean-up. I ran Check for Updates frequently after the upgrade to make sure I got all the updates, it worked perfectly well for both update and install.
I have tried Checking for Updates several times since running disk clean-up.
First time I ran it I had this error message: Windows Update error 0x8024a000 (only seen that one time)
I ran the Update Troubleshooter after that and it found/fixed the following:
Potential windows update database error detected 0x80070490 -Fixed Windows update components must be fixed - fixed
The troubleshooter did not resolve the issue. I have run Check for Updates many times since with no more error messages, but it just hangs. When I run the Update troubleshhooter it fixes the same two issues as above.
Since the disk clean, Windows Update shows:
Most recent check for updates - Never Updates were installed - Never.
As my Windows Updates were previously all succesfully installed, the history must have been cleared.
No error messages have been seen since that first one which has not repeated.
I have a DV6T with Win 8 (Can't boot to any recovery disk; infinite crash loop - HP Support Forum - 2490191).
Windows told me that there was some corruption on the hard drive, and to reboot so it could solve the problem before losing any data.
Now I am in an infinite crash loop. It will try to boot windows, but just as soon as the first dot of the spinny wheel from the windows loading screen loads, it crashes. On the next boot, it said it's preparing to repair. Crashes again. Repeat...
I tried to boot into the HP recovery environment with F11. Looks like it just skips it and tries to boot Windows. Crashes.
I put in a Win 8 DVD, and try to boot off the DVD. I press a key at the "press any key to boot from DVD" prompt. I hear the DVD seek for a bit. Then it seems like it gives up and tries to boot Windows from the hard disk. Crashes.
I tried creating a Windows 8 recovery disk on USB from another Win 8 machine. Same drill.
I brought it into my office and tried a network boot to a recovery environment. I watched the loading bar, and when it reached the end, it crashed.
I'm stumped as to why it can't even boot to external media! The two things I've been able to boot into have been HP's onboard diagnostics (full, extended suite passed) and memtest86 (which passed).
My inspiron 660 is struck in an auto-repair loop. Last night i was watching a dvd, my pc freeze and since i cant restart it. He try to repair then want to restore then nothing happen .
My PC has Windows 8 Pro 64 bits installed and when I open Computer folder or any other folder says "folder is empty" and Search process starts, showing the progress green bar but will never stop. I need to use Task Manager to stop the search.
My Dell inspiron 17 SE on Win 8.1 has crashed when I was trying to initiate a factory restore. I did the free upgrade from 8 – 8.1 and since installing I have had nothing but problems.I was in the process of formatting the HD to return this junk heap to the store where I purchased it, when I had a message of “some files are missing, please insert media”.I pressed cancel, restarted the computer - which then into a loop, and that’s all it does now.The sequence is:Start up - Automatic repair (your pc did not start correctly) - Preparing automatic repair - Diagnosing your computer - Your PC ran in to a problem and needs to restart - repeat.I then ran trouble shooting and F12 diagnostics which told me nothing was wrong and then proceeded back into the same loop on exit.
My hard disk crashed. I have a recovery cd created on the time of purchase. I bought a new hard disk for this purpose. Now when I am trying to recover from the same cd it is getting stuck at 40 % showing error. I searched for this error and got something as such recovery disk can work on OEM hd. As my old hd has crashed how can I recover over there. Is there any system that dell provide me with necessary operating system so that atleast I can use my system.
Having no fun with the Win 8.1 - call it downgrade. Had problems from the start. I've had Win 7 for some time. I bought Win 8 and an SSD and did an upgrade from 7-8 on the SSD with no problems using Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - worked very well. This left me with Win 7 on a 320 gig hard drive and Win 8 on an SSD. I didn't touch Win 7 after that until the Win 8.1 downgrade which left me with an unstable Win 8 OS. When trying to boot into 8.1 I was getting very slow response, odd startup of some programs, lockups, etc. I tried to run safe mode (recovery) in Win 8 to see what I could do to fix, but it was very hard to get into and not much use when I finally did. The last time I tried to get into safe mode in 8.1 the computer booted up into safe mode for Windows 7. Since then restarts are in Win 7, not 8. The boot into 7 rearranged the drive letters and the Win 8 SSD became an NTFS (Healthy active, primary partition), no boot, page file, etc. C: = Win 7, E: = Win 8. Since then I have not tried to start Win 8 - not sure how. (See attachment).
having Win 7 . I would like to keep it available and updated while also having Win 8 as an option.
Is there a decent start-up software for choosing which system to boot up?
Is there a way for me to repair Win 8 (disk E) so that it is bootable? The third question is whether or not I can boot up a Linux OS (Cinnamon) onto a partition on a disk and play around with it - with the same boot up software?
Perhaps a related problem was that an external storage drive had some how become unusable during the upgrade - since repaired with chkdsk /f (Gparted error log attached). I don't know if this was the primary reason that Win 8 was running so poorly. Before it was repaired it showed as a Raw disk J: and E: Win 8 disk was not shown in Computer or Disk Management. When J: was shut down E: became visible again. All disk show now that J: was fixed with chkdsk.
I have an ASUS Vivotab running Windows 8. I am seeing that the service process hits 100% disk usage from roughly 4:58PM - 5:04PM daily. I've made sure that my antivirus is't downloading updates or running during that time, same with Windows Update, Live Update, etc. How can I find what specific process is running during that time that is killing the machine given I know when to watch for it?
I have an issue that has been happening since last week i think. The problem is that even with the computer in idle the disk usage has these spikes. When i want to play a simple .mp4 file it freezes several times and the all computer freezes when the spikes reach 100 %. I don't know what is causing this issue.
I'm running windows 8.0 and recently for some reason my computer's disk usage is constantly running at 100%. It will dip once every minute or so and load whatever I've clicked or typed and then freeze again.
I've looked extensively online and there is no exclusive cause or reason for this and seems to be a very tricky issue but I will explain what I have done so far:
Disabled Supefetch and Windows Search
Ran chkdsk f command numerous times
Disabled and deleted the page file (that was setting limits)
Tried defragging, disabling firewalls, etc.
Made exceptions for some files that may have been causing issues in automatic scans.
Been told numerous times to open Resource Monitor and check what's doing it and there are numerous things running at different times that this occurs, some are: NTFS Free Space Map, NTFS Master File Table, NTUSER.DAT files, random log files. There is no consistency.
On my other pc's vista and win 7 while the computer is booting I can tap f12 to get into a temp boot page (for running live cd's and such). I cannot find this option on my dell 660 running win 8, how I can get to the temp boot screen?
My Disk Usage and CPU columns of the task manager randomly jump up to 99% or even sometimes 100% which is unresponsive. This seems to happen more often when I run programs such as a malware scanner or League of Legends. My FPS in League stays around 1 when I do try to play and I'm assuming this is a related issue.
I am trying to Initialize TPM on windows 8.1 and it is saying..
"Your TPM is currently running in Legacy mode. If you'd like to use TPM application for this version of Windows, Please contact your administrator."
Now I have clear TPM once. Disable and enable it in BIOS still no change. I am using UEFI bios and secure boot is enabled. How can I enable TPM coz I need to encrypt my hard drive without TPM it is a very hard thing to do.
I just upgraded my Dell to windows 8 because I just recently bought my computer and at the time windows 8 was not out yet. I've upgraded my computer and I have no DVD/CD drive detected. I cannot use my CD/DVD drive on my computer at all. Nothing is showing up, what's up with that? This is the drive that came with my computer so why can't I use it? I put a CD/DVD into it and nothing happens. I go into my computer and there is absolutely no CD/DVD drive detected. What do I do now? I need my CD/DVD drive to work. What I can do to make it work? Again, this is a new computer Inspirion 660S now running windows 8.
I have a Dell laptop running Windows 8. It is 3 months old.
I have lost my admin rights to the computer - I cannot make changes. Therefore, I cannot do a system restore.
I tried booting up in safe mode and turning on the admin rights via command prompt and typing "net user administrator /active:yes". It tell me 'access is denied'. I think it said "error code 5".
It may or may not be coincidence but I had installed Classic Shell a week before this problem occurred.
I have a Dell Inspiron 7537 running Windows 8 64bit. 8GB RAM, i7 processor. A little while ago it suddenly shut off. I went and checked the event viewer and got the info below. I think Toaster.exe is Dell's Backup and Recovery software, is that correct?
Brand new Dell 8500 XPS running Win 8 64 bit with IE 10. I transferred my favorites from my Win VISTA machine using Easy Transfer which caused the lost of many IE Fav Icons. Sometimes when I click on a favorite the icon will show up and some won't even though they are present on my Win VISTA machine.
Is there away to restore those Fav Icons which are supposed to be there? I realize all websites don't support the Fav Icons.
I'm thinking of buying a new Dell desktop but not interested in Windows 8. With my current Dell desktop I have the Windows 7 OEM disk for reinstallation. Could I use that disk to install Windows 7 on a new Dell PC (or maybe even just a partition of it) or will it refuse to install because it's a different machine?
I just got a new XPS 8700 with Windows 8. I have an SSD drive from the Windows 7 system that it is replacing that I want to use as the boot and C drive of the system. The XPS 8700 is new, so I don't need to preserve any data on it.
I made a set of recovery DVDs. I disconnected the hard disk and installed the SSD. I followed the instructions on the youtube video "Windows 8 Restoring From Dell Recovery Media ." I choose the factory refresh option (only restores system partition) when it appeared. It went through the entire restore process and appeared to work. It took a long time, no errors were reported and it said recovery completed. When I rebooted, the system was running Windows 7 from the old system the SSD came from.
There are only two partitions on the SSD, a 100 MB boot partition and a 80 something GB system partition. If it didn't put Windows 8 on the SSD, what was it doing all the time it said it was "preparing your hard drive", restoring your system" and "finalizing"?
I then booted from a Partition Wizard bootable DVD and deleted all the partitions on the SSD and wiped it (overwrite the disk with 0's). I tried the recovery process and this time it did not give me the choice of factory refresh or factory recovery. It just says "your drive size is not supported for this process. Please use a hard drive of at least 931 GB in size." Why on earth does it need such a large disk size to recover?
my dell inspiron 7520 running windows 8 on it but i have purchase a windows 8 pro and wish to install on it.
i delete all the partition inside hard disk, put in the disk and boot on it but a message pop up "The product key entered does not match any of the Windows images available for installation. Enter a different product key."
how can i solve it? how can i install windows 8 pro with the windows 8 pro key? can i delete the license key in BOIS?
Running Windows 8 on an Inspiron 15 and the hard drive crashed (cannot boot). Of course, I did not make backup Recovery DVDs, and I am beyond the warranty period so cannot get them from Dell. However, I was able to boot the system running Linux, create a RAW image file of the OS partition, and then was able to recover my data files. Which made me wonder--are there files in separate partitions that could be recovered to create a recovery/restore disk? My goal is to replace the hard drive and reinstall Windows 8 on the new drive (assuming that the product key, which I do not have, will reactivate automatically.)
I haven't seen anything in the forums about this approach to generating reinstall disks.
My alternative, since I have been able to recover my user files, is to purchase a new laptop.
I have a Dell Inspiron 660s desktop running Win 8. How large of a USB Flash Drive do I need to create a copy of the factory image? How large of a USB Flash Drive do I need to create a copy of the pre-installed applications, drivers and utilities? The only apps I have are the standard ones that come with the 660s running Win 8. Using Dell Backup & Recovery (Pro or Premium), I created a system backup on an external hard drive. This resulted in my external hard drive being partitioned into DBR_Master (F), which used 31.5 GB of the 1TB hard drive; and, DBR_Boot (G), using 23.6 MB. What is DBR_Master (F) all about? What is DBR_Boot (G) all about? In the event of an OS crash, will I be able to re-boot from the external hard drive? How often is it recommended to do a full system backup?
Since a system backup does not backup applications like MS-Office, is the purpose of periodic backups to capture future fixes & revisions to the OS? Since there is still a lot of unused space on the external hard drive, is it ok to save my daily data backups to the external hard drive? I tried to save data backups using File History to the DBR_Master (F) drive but it would not let me. I created a new folder in DBR_Master (F) but that didn't work. I receive a message that the destination was not connected. Where should I save daily data backups? Last question - does it matter whether I use File History or Dell Backup and Recovery to do daily data backups? Are there any advantages or disadvantages to using one over the other -- they seem to do the same thing?
On my friend's Dell Inspiron laptop, Windows 8 will not boot. I want to boot to the repair disk to restore an image I had created. F12 on boot does not show the DVD drive as an option. I went into Setup/Boot and disabled Secure Boot, still did not show the DVD as a boot option. I went back to Setup and selected Boot List Option>Legacy. Now it shows the DVD drive as an option to boot. I booted the repair dis, went through all the dialogs to select the image I had created, but when it goes to restore it it says it cannot because the image was made in UEFI, and it is now set for BIOS.
I went back into Setup/Boot and I see that the option Load Legacy Option ROM is now Enabled, it did it on its own. As a test I set it back to the defaults and re did it as above, and again it automatically changes Load Legacy Option ROM, which I assume is what is creating the problem.
So my question is what do I need to do to boot from the Windows Repair Disk?
I have a XPS 8500 with preinstalled windows 8. I tried to install Ubuntu 12.10 on it. When I partitioned the disk, I accidentally format the whole disk. Then I could not restart to Windows 8. I didn't make any backup or recovery media. How to restore factory image?
I have an ASUS laptop running 8.0 which I am running with a second screen (dell monitor) connected via VGA. I have it set so the external monitor is the primary screen and the laptop is the secondary screen. It is set for a taskbar on each display, with the primary taskbar containing the shortcuts on the monitor, so when I click them they open there. It's been working fine for months.
So I switched it on today and my taskbar shortcuts have jumped to the taskbar on the second (laptop) screen, however my external display is still set as the primary and still has my desktop icons, trashcan etc but a blank taskbar (like the one that used to be on the secondary display)! When I click the shortcuts which are now on the taskbar of the laptop screen they open on the monitor. (ie the wrong screen) I disconnected the monitor, turned off the extended desktop and set it to just use the laptop screen. All my desktop icons moved to the laptop screen but the taskbar shortcuts vanished and I was left with a blank taskbar. If I plug the monitor in again and extend the desktop they reappear, but on the wrong screen. Even if I reboot without the external screen connected I get no shortcuts until I plug in the monitor and set it to extend the desktop. I have checked all the taskbar settings and they are all correct.
Windows 8 device (Dell XPS 12 i7 running Windows 8.1 Pro). I like the touch input when it is flat in tablet mode, but when I plug a USB mouse into it when I am at my desk, I want the mouse inputs to be treated exactly like finger inputs on the touch screen. For example, scrolling by touching/clicking anywhere in a window or the ability to flick things using my mouse like I can with my finger. Simply using the mouse makes everything behave like it did in Windows 7: Clicking and dragging selects things instead of scrolling in Office 2013. I don't want this, I want it behave like Android does when I plug a mouse into it: Just like a finger was there.
I have looked everywhere for such a setting, but I cannot find one. How can I achieve this? I want all mouse inputs to be treated exactly like touch inputs.
