You watched that circle spin for eight hours. Now what?

The screen says Preparing Automatic Repair and it shows you moving dots, and moving dots mean progress everywhere else in your life. So you wait. Then you press F2 to see if that might help, and end up in a blue setup screen full of settings you have never seen.

Here is what that screen actually means.

Windows tried to start. It hit something it could not get past. So it gave up, restarted itself into a repair tool, and the repair tool ran and could not fix it either. Then it started over. That is the loop. The word Preparing is doing a lot of work there. Failed would be more honest.

The dots are an animation. They are not a progress bar. Nothing is counting down.

So why did it happen?

A drive that is starting to fail. Windows needs to read certain files to start. If the drive cannot hand them over cleanly, everything stops.

An update that went badly. A Windows update writes a lot of files. If it gets interrupted partway, you can end up with half of an old system and half of a new one, and it will not boot.

A forced shutdown at the wrong moment. Holding the power button during a disk write can create errors in the file system. Which is worth knowing, because a machine that froze yesterday and got switched off hard is very often the machine that will not start today.

Two of the situations involved power interruptions while the disk was being written to. There are many safeguards built into the system to prevent this, but not every situation is avaoidable.

Now, what to do. In this order.

One. Hold the power button until it goes dark. This is the one time a hard power-off is correct, because the machine is not accomplishing anything anyway. You are not interrupting work. There is no work.

Two. Leave it off. If the drive is failing, every hour of retry loops is more wear on the part your photos live on. Off is the safest state your computer can be in right now.

Three. Do not start pressing F-keys. F2 opens the setup screen. F12 opens a boot menu. Neither one repairs anything. What they do is give you a screen full of settings that are easy to change and hard to change back, and a boot order set wrong looks exactly like a dead computer. If you are already in there, choose Exit Without Saving.

Four. If your files are not backed up anywhere, say that first. It changes the order of the entire job, because then the work is get the files off, and repair comes second. If this post finds you before anything has gone wrong, back it up today and stop reading.

Now the repair.

Sometimes this is twenty minutes. A bad update rolls back, the machine starts, everyone goes home.

Sometimes the drive is dying and the job is recovery first and repair second, and that that might be 1 day or 5.

I can't tell you which it is without looking at the computer.

If the drive is the problem, the replacement is usually also an upgrade. The difference between a spinning drive and an SSD is the largest single change most people ever feel on a computer.

Power it off. Leave it off. Bring it in. The files are usually still there.

Don't spend hours pressing things after the problem starts.

Tomorrow: the machine that powers up fine and never shows you a picture.

Mike
PCRescue | Portland, ME