Win10 stuck in repair loop

Pukmeister

Pukmeister

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My main PC crashed during my wifes use, it’s now stuck in an endless repair loop. Trying advanced options only gives me an X drive (virtual repair drive) I cannot use dos commands to change command prompt to a C drive, it continuously defaults to X. I’ve tried to fix MBR, scandisk, chkdsk etc with no joy. It cannot repair itself.

DISKPART shows all my drive letters have changed. I can’t put it back to a previous restore point as it can’t find any despite me knowing they are there on C.

Plan is tomorrow to unplug all drives, leaving only the boot drive (M2 SSD) and try another repair. If that fails I think it’s a full restore from the original Win10 install DVD.

Any tips or advice most welcome, I bloody hate Windows. At least all my apple kit is still working.
 
If you need to get data off the drive, take it out and plonk it in another machine (or connect it via drive bay by USB) preferably a Linux or Apple machine as if there is any malign software on it its unlikely to have an effect on a Linux or Apple machine, though its probably a dodgy hard drive with failed sectors in the boot area.
 
Thanks Mzokk.

I may fit a bigger 2Tb M2 drive and then put the original 500GB OS drive in an external M2 USB housing, there’s a lot of stuff on it I wish to keep if I can recover it.

I will first try a Windows repair install whilst keeping my files and data, if it will let me.

I’m too tired tonight to go any further with it.
 
I think Mzokk’s advice is good, recover the data by using another machine. Preferably before doing any kind of boot recovery

This is your best chance of avoiding data loss.
 
I’ve had just the same problem with my laptop except I’m not as knowledgeable as you. Fortunately it’s on its last legs anyway so I’ll remove the D drive with all the photos and make it into an external drive… hopefully!
 
I did a trawl online and it seems Win10 users have suffered with the same problem since 2017, usually after an update installs. I managed to undo a previous performance update but the last features update will not uninstall and I reckon that’s the malicious culprit that has fucked the OS from being seen or bootable. The UEFI bios all seems okay, not sure what else it could be.
 
Pukmeister said:
Thanks Mzokk.

I may fit a bigger 2Tb M2 drive and then put the original 500GB OS drive in an external M2 USB housing, there’s a lot of stuff on it I wish to keep if I can recover it.

I will first try a Windows repair install whilst keeping my files and data, if it will let me.

I’m too tired tonight to go any further with it.
Click to expand...
Good idea best tackled with a fresh head (y)
 
Mzokk said:
Good idea best tackled with a fresh head (y)
Click to expand...
Indeed. The weird thing is that some repair options are no longer available, such as using F9 in advanced repair to disable automatic repair reboots ?

It’s like somebody has hacked them out of the menus ??

Anyway, enough for tonight, tomorrow is another day.
 
Three things you can try

Carry on rebooting it, its not unheard of for an update & associated changes to take time

boot - wait 15 mins , turn it off ( hard power off ) press and hold the off button till it stops rinse and repeat

press and hold F2 or F3 on boot one will take you into a boot menu

You should have the option to

safe boot

boot to cmd> prompt

Boot last known good config

Step by step booting

If you can get a safe boot - thats half the battle solved you can restore & repair from there

boot to cmd prompt will allow you to see your drives

last safe boot gives you the option to boot to a working drive

Step by step booting will allow you to see where things are getting hung up


F8 /F9 -

Some Lappys have these as a hidden partion / recovery drive


If you can access it, there is often a quick fix option (90% of the time it wont work)

a reinstall / drivers registry & other stuff (90% of the time this works ) - takes about 15 mins

Last resort is a full wipe and reinstall of the OS - only do this if your not concerned about stuff on the drive

If the drive is fubarred - i have a clone dock you can borrow - pop in a blank hard drive -and you can clone the lappys duff drive

onto a new bootable drive
 
Cheers for the advice, there’s lots still to try before I call time and reinstall the OS. Today is my 35th Wedding Anniversary so I don’t think a day spent with a computer would go down well with the wife, I’ll sort it next week one way or another.
 
Pukmeister said:
Cheers for the advice, there’s lots still to try before I call time and reinstall the OS. Today is my 35th Wedding Anniversary so I don’t think a day spent with a computer would go down well with the wife, I’ll sort it next week one way or another.
Click to expand...
A wise man :D
 
Pukmeister said:
Cheers for the advice, there’s lots still to try before I call time and reinstall the OS. Today is my 35th Wedding Anniversary so I don’t think a day spent with a computer would go down well with the wife, I’ll sort it next week one way or another.
Click to expand...
Congratulations to you both 👩‍❤️‍👩🎂
 
It’s her that deserves the congratulations for making it work, I’m fucking useless. :D
 
Just done a bit of hacking, stopped the repair looping and gained access to C:\Windows\System32

Used:

bcdedit /set {default} recovery enabled no

Now when it tries to boot we are getting somewhere, it fails and tells me that…..

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\avgVmm.sys is corrupt or missing

It’s bloody AVG antivirus at fault, but I can’t get into safe mode to uninstall it. My son put it on the PC when my Kaspersky license expired, it’s dogshit software full of bugs.

Gonna buy an M2 to USB caddy from Amazon and put the faulty drive in my garage PC then use regedit to disable AVG manually in the registry.

Bastard thing !!!!
 
Last edited:
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I recall AVG being quite good back a while - I just use MS now, nothing else.

It seems to me that those who sell anti-virus have an interest in everyone being scared of viruses.

Macafee is the worst
 
Santa-2512 said:
Downlaod a copy of Hirons bootCD


you can build a boot USB stick - well handy

Then you boot windows from USB and go a fixing
Click to expand...
Thanks Mart, I could try doing that on my (very old,2012 IIRC) i7 MacbookPro or my backup PC in the garage to make a bootable Fat32 USB stick, thanks for tip I’ll give it a go. If I can boot the PC into safe mode I can uninstall AVG and hopefully get it back to (almost) normal.
 
Just made a copy of the Hirens boot disk using my garage PC using Windows 7, note that you can’t use the latest version of Rufus to compile the bootable USB drive with Win7 as it is incompatible, I think I used 3.22 portable version available from their archive instead.

Now booted into Hirens via USB stick on my main PC and backing up all critical stuff before I try to uninstall AVG. I don’t have the option to run the AVG installer but may try downloading “AVG Clear” later and telling it which drive to remove the corrupted files from.

Wish me luck !
 
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Good that you are making progress. Sometimes with Windows a clean install is a good option if you have all the data off the drive and you have access to the programs you previously had installed. Invariably it gives a performance boost. I just tend to use Windows security now and no 3rd party AV.
 
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