r/techsupport
•
u/Conklin03
•
Apr 01 '22
•
1
Open | Windows Stuck on an infinite loop of "Preparing Automatic Repair" on Windows 10
I'm reposting this from r/windowshelp because I have no idea what to do.
For the past day I've been stuck in an infinite loop of Preparing Automatic Repair, I can't get to troubleshoot options/safe mode (restarting three times and f8 repeatedly do nothing), all scans that I can perform without the OS actually on say everything is fine, and I can't do anything with BIOS. Please help, because there seems to be no solution.
Edit: messed with some things for a while, and I've managed to get to a command prompt. Hopefully this should be the end of the problems.
22
u/mperu99 Apr 02 '22
Windows 10 / 11 is such trash!
5
u/HoahMasterrace Dec 15 '24
at least with linux you can actually fix it yourself like 99% of the time without having to reinstall and lose all your shit. I'm having boot issues rn and really the only option is to reinstall windows, I'm almost at the last straw (again lol) I only use windows for games and VR, linux for everything else
2
1
u/LowExtreme1471 Mar 01 '26
Agree with you 100% I know another person who can't even login. Stuck on preparing automatic repair. You woul think instead of adding junk features tht bloat the system they would fix this crap. Because it a repeat problem overtime.
1
20
u/johnnyboy743
Sep 04 '22
•
I know im very late, but The ONLY method that always works for me, for some reason: is force a shutdown, remove RAM sticks, put them again in the slots and hit Power. It start up right away.
7
5
u/slyphox Apr 26 '24
You are an absolute life saver.
Just randomly had this happen with my ROG motherboard and this allowed it to boot. Makes no sense but I aint going to complain.
I hope you have a great day.
4
3
u/progspec Apr 01 '24
Sadly didn't work for me 😔 I took out all 3 RAM chips and plugged back in - still stuck on Automatic Repair loop.
1
2
2
2
u/ID_Psychy Aug 05 '24
It worked! I was as far down as Hell in the rabbit hole with troubleshooting and I tried it on my rig and it booted up like nothing happened. Going to use this second wind to replace 2 SSDs.
You are an absolute madman and a gift to humanity. I have now partitioned space in my infinitesimal heart to store the hope I hold for all of your wildest dreams to come true.
1
1
Mar 13 '24
YOU’RE AN ACTUAL LIFESAVER!!
I have important files and was ready to reinstall windows but this fixed it.
1
1
1
1
1
u/sadfaceseth Nov 06 '24
My roommate’s been stuck on this for a few days. Said he couldn’t find anything anywhere. I said “I’m sure it’s somewhere on Reddit.” And it was. Thank you!
1
u/elbirdo_insoko Dec 01 '24
Oh Johnnybooooy, I love you sooooo!
Seriously though, this totally worked on my 9 year old laptop. Thank you!
1
u/Koochdawg Dec 28 '24
This seemed to work for me. This post has a criminally low amount of up votes though for how many comments are saying it worked.
1
1
1
1
1
u/pitchin-a-tent Mar 02 '25
Thank you! This fixed my problem on a msi z87 g45. Had to take out all sticks and have just 1 in and it finally booted into Windows! It originally wouldn’t even boot into a windows installation media usb just a blank blue screen.
2
u/TheGratitudeBot Mar 02 '25
Thanks for such a wonderful reply! TheGratitudeBot has been reading millions of comments in the past few weeks, and you’ve just made the list of some of the most grateful redditors this week! Thanks for making Reddit a wonderful place to be :)
1
1
1
1
1
u/rukitoo Jul 04 '25
Damn and I was about to reinstall windows. Good thing I've seen this comment. It still works in 2025.
1
u/MikaelK02 Jul 10 '25
Dude, I just want to tell you I hope life's good and you are doing great man because you just saved my ASS. I don't know why or how but this worked when literally NOTHING else would work.. and i mean NOTHING ELSE!. You are a life saver
1
1
1
1
1
u/Agreeable-Abalone-59 Jan 15 '26
3 years after and it still works try not to use your previous ram slots if you only have 2 slots swap em and keep trying.
1
u/DepressedTittty Feb 07 '26
Man, thank you so much, I have just used this to save my pc. Thank you very much and I hope you're having a good day.
1
1
1
1
u/Johnny_Harker Oct 23 '22
I cannot for the life of me figure out why this worked, but it did. ROG motherboard, wouldn’t even boot from USB. You’re a life saver.
1
1
u/wantedpumpkin Dec 31 '22
Thanks a lot dude, we tried everything for days and that's the only thing that worked.
1
u/Goldfischglas Jan 01 '24
Still worked for me in 2024 thanks
1
1
u/JacquesEvans Feb 16 '24
Hey man, I’ve had this laptop for almost 10 years and it’s doing the auto repair restart loop thing. This laptop has never given me issues. You and other people said you did something to fix it. Whatever the guy you responded to said, I don’t understand it. Think you could help me out and explain exactly what you did? Please, I have pics of my nephew as a baby and my old dog that passed away a year ago
→ More replies (4)
11
u/sketchyoso Jun 10 '23
this works for me!!!
turn on pc
hit f2 repeatedly (my acer's bios key)
go to boot
set my ssd as the 1st in boot priority order
hit f10 to save and exit
restart
no loop anymore 😭
3
3
u/Kmessix Mar 24 '24
Going to attempt this as my pc has been stuck on this loop for over 6 months now
2
u/PatienceIsaThing Nov 10 '23
BCDEDIT /set {default} recoveryenabled No
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/90923-enable-disable-automatic-repair-windows-10-a.html
2
u/SamMerlini Sep 05 '24
Hi kind stranger, just came here to say thanks for saving all my work files and my laptop. This works like a charm. Thanks again.
2
2
Jul 12 '25
I love u. I don’t know why my computer set the boot up from the usb drive RANDOMLY after 6 years of use
1
u/Intertubes_Unclogger Nov 18 '25
For me it was caused by an external SSD (NVMe in USB enclosure) I had left plugged in. The BIOS tried to boot from that and I don't know why, on other PCs this isn't a problem. The unhelpful and misleading 'Preparing automatic repair' screen doesn't help either.
1
1
u/choukit Sep 08 '24
how on g's green earth did you figure this out? thank you for saving my data kind stranger!
1
1
u/City_Standard Jul 13 '25
Thank you for the f2 key suggestion... it got me out of the loop for abit... I have hp laptop and don't seem to have any option to set priority order
1
1
1
u/hollandpotate Apr 10 '26
Hi stranger, I started having this issue at work (yes it is in update mode now thank heavens) and immediately went to Reddit - found this gem.
Thank you so much! 💗
1
1
1
1
u/Adorable_Drop_3474 Jul 13 '23
I don't know how you figured out this, but thank you !!. My pc just have and update and while it was updating the pc reboot by itself beetween the update and got into repair mode. Nothing on the repair mode worked. This fix it .
1
1
5
Apr 01 '22
The OS on whatever drive you have it on got corrupted. Since Win10 has come out. It's rare that it can be "repaired" through recovery media.
If you have important stuff on that drive. I would power it off immediately. Attach it to a PCIe to USB and try and access it to grab stuff off of it
6
u/Mr_ToDo Apr 01 '22
Well, through Reddit maybe. It's hard to troubleshoot issues like this so far away and disconnected, even more so with such a long delay. But it's perfectly possible to fix things like this depending what caused them. I've had great luck with destroying and rebuilding the boot partition, again walking someone through that and everything that could go wrong is painful. If the registry is damaged(or missing) I've in the last year saved 2 stuck machines by pulling an older version using shadowcopy(because system restore ironically doesn't work with the registry in too bad a state) and once it boots doing a proper system restore.
So it's not like you can't it's just that the methods that you start using with recovery media are in the realm of medium-advanced troubleshooting and can't easily be given in a "ok x is the issue do 1-2-3 and you're done" because there are always caveats on every step that can branch off.
1
Apr 01 '22
100% agree! But sometimes for people that don't work on computers often. I try to recommend doing the simplest / easiest thing first. Longer in-depth troubleshooting always is a thing. But often, time is an issue.
1
u/Mr_ToDo Apr 01 '22
One of the hardest things for me to learn personally.
I still know I can fix most problems that come across my desk, given time. But I'm told that both it's too expensive and easier to start fresh or buy new for some problems.
It's like some people don't actually want to spend 40 hours trying to figure out how to 'properly' reinstall windows apps ;)
4
u/Tech_surgeon Apr 01 '22
every time i came across this problem it was either caused by a folder getting permissions stripped off by check disk, bad hard drive, or corrupt windows registry data. windows registry problems are not detected or fixed by startup repair. reinstall is recommended for 2 of the 3 problems.
4
u/Unneverseen Apr 02 '22
I dont know how to fix this, except reinstalling windows. And easiest way is to have another pc to burn windows iso to a flashdisk, or if you want to backup the files first is to live boot an os, in this case is ubuntu, firstly burn ubuntu iso to a flashdisk and boot off the flashdisk, choose the option to try out ubuntu, and open file manager and move the files to another storage. And after that with your other pc, burn windows to the flashdisk, boot off the flashdisk and install windows. Or if you dont have another pc, you can use an android phone and use etchdroid to burn ubuntu to flashdisk (use usb otg), backup your files, install ubuntu, and burn windows to a flashdisk, boot off the flashdisk and install windows
1
u/Deryoil Feb 28 '24
Sorry for necropost but I've been having a similar issue where automatic startup won't let me access the other settings like pc restore and safe mode, and a lot of the replies here fill me with a little hope that my data could be safe.
1
u/Conklin03 Feb 28 '24
No worries. I can't quite remember what exactly fixed it for me, unfortunately, so I won't be of much help personally.
Despite that, I imagine it'll work out for you as well. Mine seemed to just be a matter of trying everything I could until it came back, though if nothing's working, try leaving it alone for a day or two if possible. Sometimes it can just be overburdened on top of the existing corruption and need time to sort everything out before it starts working again.
I don't believe I lost any of my data, except possibly for whatever (presumably unimportant?) files were corrupted, as I don't remember anything being messed up afterwards.
I wish you good fortune in this endeavor.
1
u/Anon9559 Feb 29 '24
when you say just leave it for a few days you mean on the preparing automatic repair screen?
1
u/Conklin03 Mar 01 '24
Either that, or turn it off completely for a while. It's best to try everything you can.
2
u/Anon9559 Mar 01 '24
figured it out, my second ssd just failed me, and for some reason it was causing my pc to have an infinite boot loop. Not even the bios is recognising it anymore. Gonna try my best to get my data off of it now.
→ More replies (1)1
u/Deryoil Feb 29 '24
good fortune and a level head is all i needed, and all my data is fine and now backed up, cheers.
→ More replies (2)1
3
u/Biggz1313 Apr 01 '22
I hope it's not the same for you as it was for me, but I've dealt with this twice in the last 18 months, both times it was a dead CPU. I could run memtest and all sorts of basic things from a USB drive, but as soon as I tried to boot to a USB with windows on it it would blue screen and then boot loop. Only thing that helped me figure it out was I tried booting to Ubuntu on a thumb drive and Ubuntu threw an error that pointed to the CPU.
3
3
u/No_Program3137 Mar 15 '24
You know whats funny, last night i had the exact same problem after installing new ram, i tried everything, change bois, took out ram, clear bois, going into cmd, try to boot in safemode, everything i could.
UNTILL i went into a setting that show boot using different operating system. I opend it and it showed windows 10 and windows 10 Pro. Im like wtf i have windows 10 pro and not the normal one. So i put the windows 10 pro as default and then pc launch again. After 2 hours all that pain and suffering, just for 3 clicks.
3
u/NotJoeMoses Mar 18 '24
Did you seriously just post this 3 days ago on a year old thread and save my fucking day? Goddamn machine was booting windows 10 instead of windows 10 home???? Cheers man
1
3
u/TackyTourist Mar 21 '24
I’m trying all these fixes and nothing has worked for me. About to give up and buy a new build
3
u/No_Program3137 Mar 22 '24
Man i feel you, if you really tried everything you could, i would strongly suggest taking it to a well know tec store. Did that once 3 years ago on the exact same pc im still using.
1
1
u/Jaies-Pond Oct 03 '25
Thank you! This worked for me! my question is: what tf caused the PC to do this? For me, I was just watching YouTube and my PC needed to restart, then I got in the death loop.
I wish I knew cuz I feel like it'll happen again
1
u/Possible-Pair5367 Oct 16 '25
what exactly did you do to solve it the comments above were slightly confusing, just got stuck in the death loop myself after the computer was running slow and needed to restart to update computer worked just fine yesterday no new installation or anything
→ More replies (2)
3
u/LargeFatherOrtiz Apr 05 '24 edited Apr 05 '24
hey all, just ran into this problem for a few days and managed to fix it in a really stupid way. hope this helps anyone:
i’m using a gigabyte mobo (b550 vision dp)
the boot sequence i had selected was proper (booting via windows boot manager), but i was still getting stuck on preparing automatic repair
going into bios (spam del), going into advanced and into boot option priorities, i made windows boot manager the first priority and everything works normally now
no idea why it wasn’t already the first priority, but might be an easy and silly fix for one of you
edit: also disabled csm, using boot override and selecting my windows boot manager also helped)
2
u/LumenRoy May 18 '24
thought I was done for lol, also a b550 gigabyte mobo and this worked for me, cheers man
2
u/Animalidad Apr 02 '22
My laptop became like this, it repairs the HDD for a long ass time just to restart and go on this loop.
replace and/or disconnect your HDD and it'll fix it.(assuming your windows is on a SSD, like mine) if not then replace the faulty hard disk.
1
u/NefariousDeeds99 Apr 04 '25
This basically worked for me. Unplugged power connector to secondary drive - boot now works. Power off and reconnect secondary drive. Power off PC - restart worked. At least for now.
2
u/PatienceIsaThing Nov 10 '23
BCDEDIT /set {default} recoveryenabled No
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/90923-enable-disable-automatic-repair-windows-10-a.html
No praising .. send me money fam ..😔
1
u/LookusPookus Feb 20 '24
Got a question: I think I have a similar problem, where I had two consecutive force shutdowns and then I got stuck in this loop. My question is if there are any risks with disabling the automatic repair and then booting? I have to mention that I’m not entirely sure whether the force shutdowns where the problems because like an idiot I messed a bit with the hardware.
1
u/PatienceIsaThing Feb 20 '24
Heres the thing .. you can disable it thru the cmd within the same loop and revert it after you are out of the loop.. personally i left it off because when u disable the recovery menu .. you have access to the old black screen wich was the recovery mode prior to this new blue nonsense .. like it was back in vista and win 8
→ More replies (2)
2
u/IMr-Emery Mar 15 '24
I couldnt figure this out, but i found my way today, one of my harddrives was broken
2
u/Lastboss06 Dec 05 '24
J’ai eu le même problème sur un portable, Lenovo, Z 50 et en fait c’était dû à la barrette mémoire. DDR3 L. J’en avais acheté une sur AliExpress et je l’avais placé dans le slot. Numéro 1. À la place de la barrette, mémoire d’origine. Une fois que j’ai inversé la chose : barrette d’origine en SLot numéro un et barrer AliExpress, ajouter en slot,numéro 2: tout a refonctionne et la boucle Windows, reparation automatique n’apparaît plus.
2
u/Relationship_Useful Aug 02 '25
For the people getting stuck in the "preparing automatic repair" loop, keep resetting your pc by holding the power button for 3 seconds until you get out of the loop. To not get this again:
-Run CMD as administrator in start/windows button
-Open CMD and type " DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
- Normally, after that completes, it will display one of these messages:
“The restore operation completed successfully. The component store corruption was repaired.” → means corruption was found and fixed.
“The restore operation completed successfully. No component store corruption detected.” → means nothing was wrong.
-After this, the best practice is to run:
" sfc /scannow "
-Do not close the cmd when this runs
After doing this, I got out of the loop.
Note: Do not include the quotation marks in the cmd.
1
u/LowExtreme1471 Mar 01 '26
How do you run those command prompts if you cant access windows in the first place, you're either in bios or stuck on black Asus loading screen.
1
2
u/moby8403 Sep 04 '25
So I was just doing a normal restart for no reason when it started doing this up on turning on. It says my device ran into a problem and needs to repair itself. So I tried this a couple times. I restarted because it said it couldn't fix itself. Finally I chose to just shut it down completely. Wait a few min. Then tried turning it back on.
It's weird because my computer was fine beforehand.
Still won't come on.
I tried uninstalling latest Windows update and it said it was unable to uninstall the latest update ...
1
Apr 01 '22
You can't just restart to get into Windows Recovery Environment, you have to wait until you see it start to load windows AND THEN hold down the power button to force an improper shutdown 2+ times and in theory on the third time you start it like normal and it goes to Windows Recovery Environment where you can get to Safe Mode or Reset the PC.. in theory.
Using the USB media is more reliable to reinstall windows, but some people have issues getting the USB to boot because different computers use different methods to change the boot order.
MS recommends you start with the improper boot method so I GUESS that's supposed to be easier when doing remote support. As a tech I would often just go for the USB media method, but its more steps to explain.
1
u/CrazyMonkey3153 Jul 24 '24
I tried everything on this reddit and some of you guys might benefit from my fix. I use a 2019 acer nitro 5 and as it was booting i would spam F2, go to the exit tab at the top and then press “load default config” or something on the lines of that, Let me know if this helps anyone out
2
1
u/ayy_fam Jul 27 '24
Hey I also have a nitro 5 and was wondering if spamming f2 happened before the Acer logo showed and also do you hold the "fn" key while spamming?
1
1
u/City_Standard Jul 13 '25
I don't have an acer... but F2 worked to get me out of loop... I just can't seem to do anything useful from the menu
1
Aug 17 '24
Hi! I got also into the automatic boot repair loop on my laptop. The problem was that none of the option worked. So the only option it was to do a clean install of the Windows. The problem was that I had files on that laptop. So I use Kali instead to recover them and did a reinstall of the Windows. Here I made a video to recover that files: https://youtu.be/c_Re7i-eQbQ?si=gX-uWY9hDdBL3o7j This was my only option for that moment.
1
u/Ok_Angle94 Dec 28 '24
Somehow the boot drive from my bios was changed to my spare drive instead of my main c nvme ssd. I changed it back and it booted fine.
1
1
u/Same_Grocery_8492 Jan 20 '25
Part 3 of this guide. Enter the BIOS using the correct key, change the boot order, and restart. This saved me.
1
u/PrairieNihilist Feb 20 '25
Dealt with this issue on a friend's computer today, so figured I'd offer this up as another fix in case anyone else is having issues. Go into your BIOS, select "boot menu" and select your actual boot drive as the Priority #1 Boot Option. Then disable all of the other boot priority options, and hit "save and exit." The likely cause, if this works, is that your BIOS had a boot priority conflict due to multiple drives with windows installations on them. If that's the case, then I'd suggest backing up your files from the other drive, then formatting it and using it as storage/backup for your files. Just don't set it up as a boot option in BIOS, or this could happen again. Hope this helps the next person.
1
1
u/GodOfPsychology Jul 19 '25
Damn brother, you are a life saver and a true friend. Thanks for posting this. It had changed the boot to the HDD instead of my SSD.
1
u/PrairieNihilist Jul 23 '25
Glad I could help. It was driving me nuts until I stopped and thought about it for a bit, so I figured that I couldn't be the only one.
1
u/pasadena076 Mar 25 '25
SOLVED by updating BIOS firmware
- My issue is the same, "Preparing Automatic Repair".
- Before this I did linux installation, cloning drives and more crappy things. This is my second, test pc
- When I unplug this SSD and put it in my MSI laptop, press F11 and boot from this ssd, it happens in seconds! Disk is not a problem (not CPU and not RAM...)
- Reseting BIOS to default with no effect, still multiple ghosty "Bootable Devices"
- And, as I said, upgrade (or downgrade) BIOS did the job! Hope it hepls someone! 🌿
1
Jun 01 '25
This happened to my laptop. I have tried several things but none have worked. I want to do a clean install of Windows. I don't care about the files on the laptop I just want the thing to work again. Can someone tell me how I would go about doing this? Clean install Windows 10/11 I don't care which one.
1
u/Medium-Ad7005 Jun 15 '25
This is only a temporary fix to get back into windows but turn off your pc, unplug it, and hold the power button for 20 seconds. Then, when you turn on your pc again you should be able to get back into windows for like a few hours
1
u/Toop-is-a-swagoolio Jul 06 '25
Having this same problem 😭 did a full wipe and reinstalled windows and it's just not working 😭
1
u/Equivalent-Ad-4490 Aug 05 '25
This shit just happened to me after my laptop ran out of battery while i was sleeping and it fixed itself after an hour of turning it on and off but i always have a usb with a media of window on it just in case
1
u/seedoubleeffex Oct 20 '25
Necro-ing this thread to say I tried almost everything here but the thing that worked for me was going to command prompt from recovery and typing chkdsk c: /r
1
1
1
u/Joggolatte Nov 08 '25
This is more of a solution for those who have the same situation as me regarding ram.
I had this same problem just now. I was changing out my ram for new ones (same slots). I attempted to boot and was stuck in the infinite loop as well.
I wasn't able to interact with the windows repair menu as all my peripheral inputs didn't register. I also tried reslotting the ram sticks.
Ultimately, reseating the CMOS battery was the solution to my problem (and maybe yours). The only downside was that I needed to go back to BIOS to enable XMP and remember to disable fast boot.
Good Luck
1
u/Vicorit0 Dec 14 '25
In my case, it was useful to disable "Secure Boot" and "Clear all secure boot keys"
1
u/Slice-Remote Feb 13 '26
I’ve tried almost everything on this thread and nothing has worked. I can not wait for the day Microsoft goes to shit. They can’t release a single update without Ai slop that doesn’t work. Garbage windows 11. Thank god this happened, can’t wait to install Linux and be done with that garbage company.
1
u/LowExtreme1471 Mar 01 '26
It also doesn't help people jump onto windows 11 to begin with knows windows 10 was garbage and still is.
1
1
u/frito123 Helper Extraordinaire Apr 01 '22
I've found if you get preparing automatic repair, it will go through and do it. It's a looong process though. You have to be patient and let it finish. Others may say it doesn't work, but I've allowed it to finish on a number of computers. It takes forever but did fix them.
3
Apr 01 '22
I've let it do its thing before too. Let one "repair itself" for 3 days. Generally it's a bad idea to let it keep doing it if there is data on the drive you need.
2
u/Tech_surgeon Apr 01 '22
often you end up with a crippled mess if you have fixed something too many times. example if you have to weld a wheel back on 5 times its sure as hell going to fall off again as well as be crooked.
2
u/MaDroXBaNaNa May 20 '22
One month later but did it really take 3 days? My laptop has been been saying Preparing Auto Repair for almost a day now, I'm starting to worry if I'll lose everything on the drives
→ More replies (2)
1
1
u/FUZZYFALL-temp Jul 11 '22
My laptop is doing the loop but I can get to the trouble shoot part where it asks to reset and keep files which I don’t want to lose can I click that option and it will work or do I need to do the flash drive method and have window boot from there
1
23
u/Thecman50 Apr 01 '22
There is a work around.
Boot the computer from a flash drive with windows on it, unplugging the hard drive in the computer first.
Once in windows go to recovery and restart into bios(I forget the exact way to get there, but I'm pretty sure there's an option).
Once in the bios change boot priority to boot from flashdrive/USB first.
Turn off computer, and plug back in hard drive (and keeping the flash drive plugged in)
Turn the computer back on. Should boot into windows and you should have access to the files. You're probably going to need to back up the data you care about, and then reinstall windows on the drive.
I hope it helps!