I was stuck on the windows startup repair loop. made progress but problem is not solved. 'FIXED'

Den 0 Reputation points
2025-09-28T15:48:24.92+00:00

Hello, If you've clicked on this thanks for taking the time to read this.

Recently I installed an old game trough steam named The Guild II. I do not know whether this is a cause or not, because Microsoft updates have also installed recently.

However, I was playing the guilt II and my ability to use my computer froze. I couldn't use the mouse or anything. After trying to restart my computer, I found myself stuck in the well known diagnose/startup repair loop where I was stuck in the startup repair menu and it kept looping there no matter how many times I restarted. I tried, uninstalling previous windows updates, and I also tried to do a system restore to a point that went back 2 days earlier. Non of this helped.

Then I tried different things in the command prompt that I saw in a tutorial video.
One of the commands it showed was. bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled no

This command didn't solve the problem, but did get me to make some progress.
Now when restarting, instead of the repair loop screen, I got a new screen. A beautiful Blue Screen with an actual error code that I could google on my phone.

The Error said,

Your PC/Device needs to be repaired. The operating system couldn't be loaded because the digital signature of a file or one of its dependencies couldn't be verified. File: \Windows\System32\drivers\sfsync02.sys Error code 0x0000428 Choose one of the options below to address this problem.

After this, I had a number of options to choose from, I chose option 7. Which disabled the driver signature enforcement. After that I was able to get into windows.

Then I ran sigverif.exe to check if there's any unsigned drivers. However they all came out alright. And the blue screen keeps appearing during restarts anyway.
So now, I'm not really sure what the problem is, what sfsync02.sys is. and how it's causing a problem. or whether i should delete it or not.

I fixed the problem. I found out the driver belongs to star force. and is a DRM driver in old legacy games. I could download a file called sfdrvup.exe from the star force website to update the file. The last restart attempt no longer gave me the loop nor the blue screen.

Windows for home | Other | Performance and system failures

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