Windows 8 is stuck in an automatic repair loop

None of these suggestions worked.  I bit the bullet pulled the drive put it in a USB caddy made an image of it with acronis true image then put it back in the system it came from formatted it and reinstalled Windows 8pro 64.  Bought this system in January.  Windows 7 had no problems on this system in 10+ months.  Windows 8 now on its third install on the same hardware.  If this keeps up I'm going back to win 7 or buying an imac.  Microsoft has been useless to me in these forums and via phone support.

How did you get your old "non-genuine" system to boot up?  I get to the blank screen with "this version is not genuine" in the corner, screen and it doesn't do anything no matter what I do.

Regards

Mark

SS01xprt suggests maybe inferior DDR3 memory triggers the automatic repair problems..

 

I have the same kind of automatic repair problem as mentioned in this thread, with a brand new Medion PC. Started with endless automatic repair loop (waited long time). After that none of the repair (etc) options succeeded, not even complete reinstall. In the end I even got a BSOD and automatic switch off of the PC (repeated 3 times).  It seems Medion succeeded in reinstalling the system back to factory settings, but most probably they just put a new copy of an image of their 'master' to the SSD (don have the pc back yet). 

I am very curious if the cited possible cause of the automatic repair problem (bad DDR3 memory) makes sense. And if it was observed by anyone else or was just a coincidental hit to an incidental cause.  

Below some description of how the problem appeared in my case...., but it seems to be a common story with some random variations....

In the Dutch 'department' of this Forum the same problem is discussed. At least 2 other persons and myself had the problem even with the same PC, bought on 12 december 2012. 

In my case the automatic repair loop problem started after 5 days already.  Like mentioned here, not any of the repair/restore/refresh options solved the problem. No initial system configuration point to return to, other 'light' restore functions all gave errors.  Even the complete reinstall also didn't  complete: after 25 minutes, when it said the job was done it automatically restarted. Then it came up with a message that it could not restart because crucial files were defect or missing (or something like that) and that i should put in the system disk (W.t.h., How possible??? There is a complete recovery partition on the hard disk; i dont have a complete installation disk, and the Recovery disk gave no reaction.). 

Because i expect that the same problem will occur within a short while after i get the pc back, i started to read also the English fora... And now I see that the problem is occuring on a wide scale, many people suffer from it, with some variety of appearances but probably the same basic cause. Who knows how many others are still wondering what they do wrong and feel so stupid because they cannot performs such a simple standard procedure. At least it is presented as such by Microsoft and the Repair Services of the manufacturers, you just have to reinstall your system....   

Anyhow, even if it has something to do with hardware failures like the suggested DDR-failure, it is no excuse why all 'manual' repair options of Windows 8 cannot solve the problem apart from complete reinstall, in my case even only from an image. Even if a hardware malfunctioning is the trigger, it is still also a Windows (Microsoft) problem. Why can't we at least skip this desastrous automatic repair like we could skip checkdisk in the earlier windows versions?

I  also wonder if -in my case- the reason why the non-destructive repair option didnt work can have something to do with the limited capacity of the SSD (64GB) from which the system is started. I got the message that there was not enough room for the back-up that was automatically made and that i should make room first... I couldn't do that because i had no access to / control over the PC...., neither do I know how to disable this backing-up into a 'windows.old' file or at least how to tell windows to make that backup to the Harddisk (2TB, nearly empty...). 

But from what I read from the fora I think that even then, the option would not have worked because the problem is more basic, maybe a messing up of the register by the automatic repair.

Is Microsoft at least working on a solution to this major automatic repair problem?

And is there maybe a possibility to downgrade to windows 7 from my Windows 8 (OEM) license (i bought the pc directly with windows 8)? So that i can use my pc -once i have it back- at least for some time until Windows 8 is reliable...?