Windows 8 is stuck in an automatic repair loop

Maybe at least for some of the many people with automatic repair / recovery related problems, the following may be helpful.

On the Dutch forum, member TAK101 reported this thread on another forum (Thanks tak101!)

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproinstall/thread/57931d5c-6f63-479e-aa09-5949651d968b :  "Windows 8 UEFI won't boot together with, in presence of, another drive in the system when that other drive contains an extended Partition."

 

At least in my case it is probably the source of the problem: I repartitioned my internal harddisk adding an extended partition with some logical drives. This harddisk is the second drive, because the system is on an SSD (c:) According to this thread (or a linked one) it applies to both internal and external drives.

 

Can Microsoft confirm this and does this mean it might be solved adding only primairy drives in repartioning, until this obvious bug in windows 8 is solved?

Where will Microsoft inform us about this bug?..

Maybe at least for some of the many people with automatic repair / recovery related problems, the following may be helpful.

On the Dutch forum, member TAK101 reported this thread on another forum (Thanks tak101!)

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproinstall/thread/57931d5c-6f63-479e-aa09-5949651d968b :  "Windows 8 UEFI won't boot together with, in presence of, another drive in the system when that other drive contains an extended Partition."

 

At least in my case it is probably the source of the problem: I repartitioned my internal harddisk adding an extended partition with some logical drives. This harddisk is the second drive, because the system is on an SSD (c:) According to this thread (or a linked one) it applies to both internal and external drives.

 

Can Microsoft confirm this and does this mean it might be solved adding only primairy drives in repartioning, until this obvious bug in windows 8 is solved?

Lockscreen if it shows at all changes to blue-ish purple flickering screwn with arrow and circular loading mouse tip but nothing happens after that.

 

That sounds like it might be more viewable on an attached monitor.   Do you have one?   Press Win-P, CursorUp, Enter in any case.

Also, try disconnecting all unessential devices.   I finally saw something like people are describing yesterday.   Turns out I had forgotten to remove a suspect USB flash drive that was hanging the boot.   I have left it in to try to see it again but so far no luck.   I think it was stuck in a driver, hence no interrupts allowed.   No sign of hard drive activity but my fan was going non-stop.   Another sign that interrupts were blocked is that I left it in that state for over an hour (so longer than it would take to get into the black screen state or the Sleep state) but there was still no change. 

 

Otherwise another thing that I recently became aware of is the possibility of pressing Shift-F10 to get to a WinPE command line (unless that option is suppressed by the package.)   If that worked it could be a lot simpler than trying to navigate the login screen in the dark.   Of course that assumes that that transition would happen on a viewable monitor.   ;  )

 

 

Good luck

 

Robert

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Unfortunately I don't have access to an attached monitor. However I was able to resolve the issue. I powered off, unplugged adapter, pulled out battery and left it for 15min. Came back and booted into advanced recovery with recovery cd, then refreshed system settings using repair cd. Saved all my files but all programs had to be reinstalled. From what I can remember there was a problem with an Intel driver.