As in title really. My little brother has an 8.1 laptop, and from what I understand, when it prompted him for updates he clicked to restart. Now when the laptop tries to restart he sees his manufacturer logo and the Windows 8 loading circle, but after this the monitor goes black and stays that way. At some point a bluescreen pops up, says something about fixing the PC, goes to 100% after 5 minutes, restarts the PC, and the PC goes back to the manufacturer logo to start the loop again. Any ideas about what to do here? Thanks.
Restore Health If you could get into advanced boot options and run the next command: Code: Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth Then come back and tell us what happened.
Uh, laptop now boots after several loops of the above. The Windows 8 loading screen happens, and then I get into desktop - completely black, but for the taskbar and the Startisback+ start button. I can load certain programs, and I can even watch films, but trying to set cmd to restart the pc in safe mode doesn't work, msconfig won't load, and I can't get into This PC, or Device manager. Sfc/ scannow doesn't work (another error about some dll). Trying to open those result in error messages telling me things like server service can't be started because of wrong user, or some dll is missing, or things like that. I can't seem to get into my laptop's BIOS, or advanced boot options.... It's just weird that I can access some programs and files, and the start menu, but not the important things. Boot and shut down take forever as well. Not sure how to continue at this stage. My thought is to take out the HDD, transfer important files via a SATA cable to another PC, and try and reinstall, though I don't have access to the Win8 key at the moment since my bro got his laptop from his university. I'm hoping that there's an easier way to do this.
You can try going into the renew/refresh mode... The following command will bring up the recovery options. Code: shutdown /r /o /t 0
Thanks for the suggestion murphy78, it seemed promising for a while. PC rebooted, showed a pale blue screen, followed by a screen with a background the colour that my brother had chosen as his personal colour (maybe a coincidence, I wouldn't know - it's purple btw) with a Windows 8 loading circle, but that's where it's been stuck for an hour. Edit: Turned off laptop for now. No progress since I posted. Turning the thing off was a pain, had to press the power button several times for it to decide to turn off rather than going to sleep >.>.
Thanks everyone. Unfortunately, I can't seem to access advanced boot options, or even the BIOS. Furious mashing of the correct buttons yields nothing apart from a painfully slow load into a broken Windows every time. Annoyingly, the boot order seems to have put the HDD above other media, since Windows 8 install media doesn't load. I'm going to concede that some piece of hardware is borked. My bro's laptop is covered by warranty, so I'm just going to take out the HDD, transfer his data, and let the manufacturer/bro's uni worry about things. Thanks.
f8 doesn't seem to work in win8 like it did for win7, however a lot of times vendors will set the default winre key to f1, so you can try holding that during boot.
Thanks again. I actually have tried shift+f8, as well as all of the other f keys, esc, del, etc.. Any key that looked like it might lead to some progress, all to no avail.
If you still able to get to desktop restart keeping Shift key pressed and you'll get to advanced boot options
You can reach the boot options by resetting the PC during boot a few times, it will default to repair boot Or boot from DVD / USB and choose Repair option
You can actually use a win8.x install disc as a winre... Just click the "Repair your computer" link after selecting your language.
OH! Snap! I got into boot options and managed to load my Win8 media. Trying a refresh says that my drive is locked? System Restore doesn't work, Start-up Repair did nothing. Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth did nothing. I tried following the tutorial by s1ave77, but I can't seem to get that working either - in the guide, he uses D: and F: drives. What drives to those represent? I used diskpart and found out my drive letters. My Windows 8 install media is D: and my Windows drive is C:. Which one goes where in "dism /image:d:\ /scratchdir:f:\ /get-packages"?
Used C drive as my scratch drive as well as my install drive. The process went smoothly and cmd showed the same message as in the guide, but after reboot, the laptop still won't boot . After the manufacturer logo, I see black. I don't get it, it seemed to be going well T_T. Anyone know why it didn't work?
No, my drivers were all directly from the manufacturers of the components, and I'm simply using the laptop screen. I thought uninstalling the update as the guide suggested would fix things, but I'm afraid I'm now in a worse situation than before, as before I was at least able to very slowly load into a broken Windows. My laptop's been on a black screen for about 10 minutes now, should I just leave it for a bit?
If it were my laptop, I would install Windows from scratch and not waste any more time trying to recover from whatever is causing the problem.
Yeah, I've managed to get into safemode now, and it seems one of the issues I'm having is that the Update isn't staying uninstalled. After staying on a screen that says something about failing to configure updates, the laptop restarts, I have to reboot it again a number of times to get safemode working, and then wait a bunch to get into it. Every time I try and uninstall the update, I get more failing to configure updates screens, more pointless reboots. I feel like I've gone to gargantuan lengths to try and solve this issue, so I'm going to reinstall. Thankfully that's now an option, and thankfully I can now get into safemode to get access to all of my files first . Thanks to everyone who helped out!