Maintenance :: Avoid Windows 8.1 Automatic Repair Boot Loop?
Feb 7, 2014
Since upgrading to windows 8/8.1 x64 i have twice had this situation when during boot up windows tries automatic repair & fails , every time i restart same repair fail happens , its stuck in this cycle , neither "Refresh" or "Reset" option works , . I have to do a fresh format & install , loose all my files stored in the OS partition , I even tried to recover the files using linux boot cd but the folders were inaccessible/corrupted .
I tried every solution i could find to make it boot including Unable to refresh or reset PC after Automatic Repair fails in Windows 8 but nothing worked .
This has happened twice in the one year since i have been using Win 8 , Is there any way to avoid this from happening i future ?
Acer Aspire V5 is the PC I am using. I turn it on, the boot fails and the pc restarts. Then begins an automatic repair, which crashes and the PC turns off. It is a loop I cannot get out of. I don't have a Windows 8 Disc or anything like that.
Just reinstalled windows 8, loaded everything up and had it perfect. Then I installed a windows update (could it have been 8.1?) and then my computer would not boot. It got stuck on the windows 8 logo with the circle just spinning. After I restart it tries to automatically repair but that doesn't work. I popped the Windows 8 disc in and tried to do a system restore using a restore point but it said "You need to select an OS. Please restart the system and select an OS". ??? I'm not dual booting! Windows 8 is the only OS installed!
Tried safe mode but the windows logo just hangs. Any possibilities to salvage this before doing yet ANOTHER reinstall or refresh or whatever.
My Toshiba laptop/Windows 8.1 installed a VLC Media player & Malware bytes today. I was instructed to Restart as 'drivers not working properly' & since then have been on the Automatic Repair loop. It says it cannot fix it - log file: C:WINDOWSSystem32LogfilesSrtSrtTrail.txt, & I tried a few System Restore points but that just says -
System Restore could not access a file. This is probably because an anti-virus program is running on the computer . Temporarily disable your antivirus program and retry System Restore. You can try System Restore again If you continue to see this error, you can try an advanced recovery method.
Thing is I can't get into Windows or my laptop to disable the antivirus program.
I don't have any CD or DVD & no product key as the disc has been misplaced.
It's only been two days since I got windows 8 Pro on my alienware. Recently I force shut down because it was not shutting down. And when I open it today it gives an error message saying that Automatic repair could not fix the problem.
The error code is: "D:WINDOWSSystem32LogfilesSrtSrtTrail.txt
I have tried everything. I have used command prompt and the following commands have also been tried.
Nothing has worked so far. I have tried everything except a fresh installation of windows. I have already taken a backup previously. I am a little apprehensive about formatting again.
I was playing WOW the other night on my month old PC and all of a sudden I got a full red screen. I restarted the comp and this auto repair screen popped up and it freezes and just same thing over and over. the bottom of the screen is cut off and the only other window i can get into is the bios setup utility window. Cant get into any kind of safe mode nothing.
Recently was running a backup program and suddenly I get the Windows 8 blue error screen (the one with the mocking '' icon) and system dies. I turn on and it seems to booting very slowly then it proceeds to do the pre login screen installation of updates. After half an hour or so and with updates on around 70%, system dies again. Now when I turn the machine on it appears to alternate between either hanging for ever on the Windows 8 loading screen or attempting to run an 'Automatic Repair' which invariably results in a blank screen and no fix.
Having read several 'Automatic Repair loop' posts on the net, it appears I need to load the recovery disc and run repair or restore programs from there. Of course the CD I made failed (crappy disc?) so I had to search my original licence email and use the provided link to download and create a new installation disc from a working machine. This disc loads and gives me the option to install Win 8 (presumably a fresh install with loss of files) or a troubleshoot menu. Running the automatic repair option results in a rather inane 'Couldn't do it' message and gives a blank path to a log file. The system restore option prompts me to 'Restart and select operating system before trying this' and i'm not sure how to do this as no such option is given at boot.
I initially had a different processor and motherboard, but after changing both of those due to failures, everything is now working fine, until I do a restart. The main restart issue is that it gets stuck in an automatic repair loop until I can get to Safe Mode and then restarting from there somehow undoes the updates from Windows Update. If I keep those updates off, though, and just try to do a general restart, I get a BSOD Watchdog error. I'll include that log, just in case. It'll be in CBS.zip since I'm including the whole CBS folder from WindowsLogs. I'm really not sure what's wrong here.
Working as a Mainframe programmer, I am automatically assumed to be an expert in all things IT and so a friend of the family has passed me a laptop to repair
What we have is the common Automatic Repair loop. The computer restarts, states "Preparing Automatic Repair" and "Diagnosis..." etc etc, and then does it all again. I cant get to the recovery menu or bios having tried different combinations of Shift F8, F12, F2.
I have found so far recommends booting from disk. Unfortunately, the owner of the laptop has no manual or box or any record whatsoever of the product key.
The laptop came with windows 8 preinstalled. I have tried to boot from a Windows 7 DVD, but it does not appear to be recognised and continues to do the automatic repair loop.
I accidentally removed a usb cable from a powered usb hub , and a volume slider of some other program appeared superimposed and floating above my music making program , so I restarted the pc. From then on , it wouldn't start , and kept saying preparing automatic repair, then reached 40% and wouldn't go any further.
I unplugged my 2 external drives because they weren't showing in the bios , and plugged them into my laptop to check they were ok , and I am relieved to say they are.
Since i removed the drives , my desktop ( asus ) will eventually arrive at the blue recovery screen , but all these things that are supposed to fix it , aren't working.
When I try to refresh , it says the drive where windows is installed is locked. I've tried to do a system restore from 3 different restore points and none of them have worked ( one actually cited a mozilla profile as being the cause )
Re-image wont work because it cant find the image file , which is on one of my external drives which are now unplugged. Automatic repair diagnoses , but then says it cant repair. It also will not boot into safe mode.
I can use command prompt, and was hoping I could rename the system hive name , but the command prompt says X=windowssystem32.
I've tried cd%windir%system32config , but it says " the drive , the path, or the filname is not valid" . I have successfully ran regedit from the command prompt .....
I had no reasons to expect anything untoward before yesterday. The automatic repair thing happened before , about 4 months ago , but i was always able to get out of it by switching it off at the wall. Now that doesnt work and its in an endless loop .
I have hirens bootcd but there are a lot of things on it that i dont know how to use. I was able to get mini xp working via hirens but couldn't access system restore.
So system was running perfectly (custom pc, win 8, samsung pro ssd), just did a clean install, fresh drivers, etc. It was running great! ASUS Sabertooth p67 mobo, latest bios.
Then out of the blue, mid game, i get a hard lock up stall. no blue screen but just lock up. shut down and when i reboot, bios didn't find my samsung ssd. unplugged my 2nd sata drive, booted again and now it found the samsung ssd however i got the "no disk found press ctl alt delete"
At this point i ran windows recovery console and did the bootrec fixboot, fixmbr, rebuildbcd, chkdsk party. everything said it was completed successfully.
Now when i boot however i am stuck in an auto repair loop and can never boot into windows 8.
I am thinking the crash is somewhat power supply and/or mobo related. new power supply is on the way and mobo being RMA'ed.
A couple days ago, I was casually playing Warframe. Tried to alt+tab out to check an IM and my screen went black. Not sure what happened as I could still hear the mouseover sounds as though Warframe were still active. Fiddled around for a few minutes and couldn't get Task Manager to come up, so I decided to just hold the power button on my laptop until it shut down. No harm done, right?
When I booted back up, Windows greeted me with a "Diagnosing Your PC" message under the normal Toshiba boot logo. After it hung there for a few seconds, it moved on to the "Attempting Repairs" screen. Didn't take long for it to decide it wasn't too happy with me for suddenly shutting it down.
Since then, I've been stuck in an auto repair loop. So far I've googled everything I could think of, but it seems my efforts were in vain. Tried putting Hiren's on a thumbdrive and booting from there, and for some reason, Windows just boots right back into the auto repair screen. I've even wiped my 1TB external and put the recovery image from my work PC on there. That didn't work either. I've gone through every thread google's given me and I feel like I'm banging my head against the wall.
I should probably note that formatting is not an option for me. I'd try installing Ubuntu on my external, but since the recovery won't even boot, I feel like that'd be in vain.
I have a Windows 7 / Windows 8 dual boot setup that was initially working fine. When attempting to update the graphics drivers in Windows 8 last week, something went wrong and the system crashed. Now when I attempt to boot into Windows 8, it goes into the Attempting Automated Repairs loop which never finishes, even when left running for several hours. I attempted to boot off of the Windows 8 installation CD and do a Refresh but it just errors out saying Windows could not be refreshed.
It is a Toshiba satellite L675 and the stickers indicate it is a windows 7 model. However, when I open the machine and turn it on, I am welcomed by the windows eight logo. Past this, I get an endless wait time. It alternates from no message to preparing automatic repairs from boot to boot. I have tried to go into its preperscibed setup mode (f2 at startup) and the boot menu (f12 at startup) neither of these have taken me to a bios or any other interface. I have tried ctrl+f8 and have gotten no success. I have also tried every function key and ctrl plus every function key individually.
Some Three Months ago, I updated online my WIN 8 Pro OS to WIN 8.1,Since when it has run without any problems, but Unfortunately this morning,when I switched on my PC, I got the following Messages.
1. Preparing Automatic repair 2. Diagnosing Your PC 3. Automatic Repair 4. Your PC did not start correctly - Pressed restart button 5. Repeat of 1, 2, 3 6. Pressed Advance Options button 7. Pressed Continue button 8. Repeat of 1,2, 3 9. Pressed Troubleshoot button 10. Pressed Refresh your PC 11. There is a problem with refreshing your PC 12. Pressed Start Up Repair 13. Start Up repair couldn't repair PC 14. See D:windows system32logfilesmtsattrail.txt 15. Tried System restore but got a message saying No System restores available 16. Selected option for booting from my old WIN 7 Disk
After a short wait my WIN 7 OS booted up successfully and I was able to see the WIN 8.1 OS Disc . I ran my Kaspersky AV on it which came up 'clear', I then ran the OS Disc test which also came up with no errors. Also I Cannot find the log message referred to in 14
Unfortunately I only have my WIN 8 CD, and WIN 8 System Repair disk, which will not work with my current Windows 8.1 installation. I can get into my BIOS by pressing the "del" key on boot, but cannot get into the F8 menu for Safe Mode options.
Computer was running slow so I did a reset of windows. It worked but the problem still existed. My computer froze so I turned my laptop off and back on only to find it stuck in that automatic repair loop. I tried system restore, no luck. I made that bootable usb for repairing and that didn't work either. Straight repair won't work either. I have tried every option and am completely lost as to how to proceed. I need the files off the hard drive but don't have a way to connect it to anything to be able to access the files.
I have a PC that I have been running Win 8 Consumer Preview since it was available. I have two HD's partitioned to dual boot Windows XP SP3 and Win 8, with Win 8 set as default. I have been running Win 8 over 95% of the time. Everything has been working fine until this morning.
When I came out of screensaver in Win 8 and attempted to get to my login page nothing happened. So i shut down using the power button, after that Win 8 would not start, nor could I get to the dual boot screen. After a number of tries i finally got the dual boot screen and attempted to start in XP. XP nearly completely started (I had desktop, task bar, desktop icons, etc), but then it shut down as well and displayed a blue screen and error message "A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.".
I have tried starting from my XP install disk with the same error message ("A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." ). I have tried starting from USB flash drive that has my Win 8 Install. It is the same USB flash drive that i originally used to install Win 8. It hangs at the 'fish' screen. I have tried just starting the machine several times, but it hangs at 'Preparing Automatic Repair'.
I have everything disconnected (printers. ethernet, USB Wifi adaptor). The only things connected are my keyboard/mouse, speakers, and (1) 17" monitor. I normally run a 23" widescreen and the 17" monitor.
I have disconnected the slave HD and tried booting with XP install disk and USB Win 8 with no success.
Currently, both HD's are connected. I tried a normal start up and the machine is stuck at 'Preparing Automatic Repair'
This has never happened before such that I could not boot into either XP or the XP Install CD or the Win 8 USB Install flash drive, in order to attempt repairs to MBR or Win 8 troubleshooting diagnostics.
Complete error message on Blue screen:
"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSk /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.
Ok, So, I started up my laptop this morning and the screen was all wonky, It was light blue and there were swiggly white bits, I waited a bit and then restarted it.
The Auto Repair started up when the computer started back up so I left it alone for a bit
"Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC"
I was like Ok, I checked the logfiles "Boot critical file c:/ci.dll is corrupt"
It won't let me refresh or restore my computer.
Forgot to say, If I restart it just loops back to the auto repair.
I have this identical problem mentioned here : Scanning and repairing volume (?Volume...) on startup
I think it has something to do with my deleting the 'system reserved' 350mb partition when I reinstalled Windows 8. I don't want it showing in My Computer and when I go into Disk Management and give it a drive letter, this message goes away on boot. But, since I can't merge this very small partition with any other drive, I'm not sure how to not show this drive and not get the scanning message on boot up.
About a week ago I had the same exact problem. When I would turn on my pc it would try to diagnose my computer, repair it, and then fail and find no problem. I didn't find any solutions so I did a fresh install. Now its happening all over again. I originally thought the problem was my OS and re installing would fix my problem. Now I think that my SSD (OCZ Vertex 450) might be the problem.
I think that disabling automatic repair could also fix the problem, but I don't want to turn that off and cause another potential problem if it wont stop the boot loop. I also have a hard drive which I could install windows on if I need to, but I am not sure my SSD is the problem and if it cant be fixed. I haven't been downloading anything lately, and I formatted both my SSD and hard drive when I did a clean install so I don't think the problem is a virus.
My Gateway machine was performing a windows update when the neighbourhood power went out. It was off for four hours. When I went to turn the computer back on, it said automatic repair the diagnosing your pc.....that lasted about 5 hours! Then a blue screen with options came up. When I went to pick the advanced options, I clicked accidentally on the first one and it rebooted into the repair loop again. Since it takes so long for the diagnostic part, when the blue screen came up again it was likely the middle of the night.
I saw it at 7:00 am and tried to click the advanced options but the computer had gone to sleep by then and so once again it got rebooted into the loop. Gateway refused to support since the warranty is up. I can't find a Recovery disc image for 8.1 to put on a usb stick, and I'm back to trying to find answers on my 12 year old machine running XP. I tried the boot to safe mode with alt+F10 but can't get that to work either. If I knew how to force a reset to factory defaults without being able to get into windows I would. I've been doing this for 3 days now and I was just starting to like 8.1 too...
My computer is custom built. I have a Windows 8 DVD but when in try to boot from it the circle spins and sound then just shows a blue flash quickly and restarts into the loop.
I have Windows 8 64 bit Pro Edition working fine using UEFI boot from a SSD disk. I've twice created a system repair disk on DVD but when I use boot override in the BIOS to boot from the DVD, I get the message "Non-system disk....
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 .
I upgraded to windows 8.1 when it was available and the first time I turned off my computer after upgrading, it all started and now I'm stuck in this automatic repair loop. To top it all off my mobo: Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3... has now become my main issue.
I have a bootable flash drive loaded with windows 8.1 and a bootable DVD loaded with windows 8.1 but my mobo supports only HDD and CD-rom...
I have no clue what to do, as I can't use a repair disc to repair my computer and I CANNOT Reset my PC, I have way to many files that I need on my HDD.
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.
So i have my friends Asus Laptop with Windows 8 running on it. Every time it strts up it displays the windows logo and after staring at a black screen for a few minutes it displays the message similar to Windows has encountered an error, (i'll update with the exact message when it pops up again) for a few seconds then immediately restarts to an asus logo with the message "Preparing automatic repair" and a boot animation, followed by a black screen, then it starts all over again. i can enter the bios settings by holding escape at startup but i'm not sure what i can do from there. is there anything besides getting the os on a flash drive that can be done?
There have been a lot of questions about how to boot directly into desktop and avoid Metro. My question is just the opposite. When I'm in Metro and I open an app, it first brings up the desktop and then the app on top of it. I would like to open an app without opening desktop. Is there a way?
