STARTUP REPAIR HAS BEEN RUNNING FOR 3 FULL DAYS

I think something has gone wrong with the so called repair. I've seen this a time or two

(More than that after my first upgrade to Win10). There are a number of things that can lead to this repair loop.

It's frightening to 'pull the plug' when told you cannot cancel the operation, but you can

(well I've not had any issues when doing so. Gotta do what you gotta do sometimes).

• Shut the machine down via the power switch, disconnect, and wait for the motherboard to power down

(you can tell when this happens if you have active speakers connected as they will make a popping noise,

or about 30 sec).

This should prevent it from going straight back into the 'repair' loop. If you get an option to repair again,

skip it and boot straight into Windows.

Assuming you HDD is not failing you should be able to boot into Windows.

• If you have trouble booting into Windows use the restart button on your machine to reboot again,

and start tapping the F8 key.

This should open the boot options screen where you can boot into Safe Mode from.

• When you reboot move enough data to and external HDD to bring your main HDD back to below 85%.

You need to keep 15% minimum free space to allow for defrag to work. so you really need to bring it

down to say, 70% to allow for the inevitable accumulation of more data.

• You can uninstall some programs that you don't use, but programs don't generally use much space.

Video, Music and Photos do tend to add up, and of course, games can be very large.

• Reboot again via Windows. This will allow Windows to finalise any system changes it needs to make,

which don't get done when using the restart button or switching off via the power button

(as with a lock-up, or other crash that does not allow access to Windows).

• Run Windows Disk Cleanup to free up some more space, and follow that with defrgamenting the HDD.

If the HDD has not been defraged recently it may take a long time to defrag (hrs, not days).

• You can use the Windows Defrag tool, but a lot of people aren't very fond of it. Myself included.

I prefer the free version of AusLogics Disk Defrag below (use the defrag and optimise option), but there are others  -

AusLogics Disk Defrag

• When doing big repairs, I'm inclined to reboot again to keep Windows happy.

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Unfortunately you still cannot run chkdsk on the OS drive without re-booting, but being able to boot into

Safe Mode may allow for other troubleshooting steps to be taken.

Even being able to restart properly from Windows Start\Shutdown options could help. Assuming the HDD is

not faulty.

• There may be another way to finish the check, but all I know of is to boot into another OS from another HDD.

One of the Linux OS's are sometimes recommended, and can be run from a bootable USB drive

(I've never tried this, so can't give details).

With the machine running on another OS you can run chkdsk on the problem HDD without having to reboot.

Another startup option (F8) worth trying -

• From the boot options screen select the option - 'last know good configuration' (or similar phrase).
• There is also a possibility the Master Boot Record is corrupt. If you have a Win7 install disk you can

boot to the disk and fix the MBR from there -

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20864-mbr-restore-windows-7-master-boot-record.html

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