Windows 10 finally booted to desktop after 4 hours of freezing on boot. What do I do so that this doesn't happen tomorrow?

Anonymous
2024-07-25T02:30:12+00:00

My computer restarted overnight (assuming from an update) and froze on the boot screen where it shows the motherboard logo. It's also been freezing at the 'Preparing Automatic Repair' screen about 9/10 times.

I've tried resetting the CMOS by unplugging the power cord and holding down the power button, but it didn't help.

The few times I managed to access the troubleshooting tools and the command prompt I tried the bootrec /fixboot commands but I ran into the problem of "Path not found" at the attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s step. On the final restart before I was about to plug in the bootable USB to reinstall windows, it booted to desktop with everything working as normal.

I feel like this is only temporary and I'll run into the same problem the next time it restarts. What do I need to check/fix so that this problem doesn't happen again? Or do I just need to bite the bullet and do a fresh install of Windows?

(I'm not sure if this was due to my fiddling around but I now have 2 recovery partitions on my C drive, and an addition EFI System Partition on an external HDD.)

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Performance and system failures

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

54 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,965 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-07-26T11:56:37+00:00

    I wonder if there has been any progress. What's the ETA mentioned?

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2024-07-26T09:42:35+00:00

    My bad, I forgot the end bit. I ran the command and it froze at Stage 4: Looking for bad clusters.

    The mouse is unresponsive and the numbers have stopped moving too.

    Yesterday morning, it also always freezes in WinRE after a minute or so.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,965 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-07-26T09:34:25+00:00

    As mentioned earlier, run:

    "chkdsk c: /r"

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2024-07-26T09:33:33+00:00

    I ran chkdsk c: and it shows me a list of commands.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,965 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-07-26T09:16:24+00:00

    Unfortunately, not all motherboards have that option. If the option to disable individual disks is not there, the only way is to detach them physically or pull the power connector to the drive.

    You can run Chkdsk from WinRE. To find the OS partition's drive letter in WinRE, run:

    bcdedit | find "osdevice"
diskpart
list volume
exit

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments