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

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  1. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,965 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-07-28T05:10:33+00:00

    Right-click Start, and click "Event Viewer".

    Expand "Windows logs" and click "System".

    (or)

    Share the following event log files on OneDrive.

    1. Event Log files:

    "C:\windows\system32\winevt\logs\Application.evtx"

    "C:\windows\system32\winevt\logs\System.evtx"

    1. Msinfo log:

    Run "msinfo32.exe", press Ctrl + S, and save it to an NFO log file.

    Share the above three logs on OneDrive.

    Share OneDrive files and folders - Microsoft Support:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/shar...

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-07-28T05:08:38+00:00

    Where can I find that?

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  3. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,965 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-07-28T04:58:04+00:00

    The drive might be going bad. Are there any critical/error events reported in the System Event log?

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-07-28T03:11:22+00:00

    A new day comes with new problems. After I rebooted the PC I was met with a boot screen that didn’t freeze this time, but kept spinning the dots for a lot longer than usual.

    After a restart it started freezing on boot again. I don’t know if that USB cable was a red herring or why its able to successfully boot sometimes,, but after more testing, the computer only boots when the D: drive, which stores all my user files (documents, downloads, music, etc) is disconnected. Because of this, I get this error when I try to sign-in

    “The User Profile Service service failed the sign-in.

    User profile cannot be loaded”

    Additionally, the login screen also freezes after a few seconds.

    Is it a bad D: HDD, and fixable by cloning it to a new HDD?

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  5. Ramesh Srinivasan 87,965 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2024-07-27T02:30:45+00:00

    Please detach everything and boot. Connect one peripheral at a time. Ensure the BIOS is updated.

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