New
#1
PC will only boot into Safe mode
Hello,
My PC has been stable for several months, since I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10. On Friday something changed (not triggered by any user action) and the PC is now no longer able to boot successfully.
The boot cycle now goes BIOS->Blue Windows logo with spinning dots -> Blank screen with spinning dots.
And it hangs at this last point (I left the PC overnight twice - both times, no progress).
I can boot the PC into Safe mode and Safe mode with networking, which both work fine. But every other attempt to boot into any other configuration results in the same hanging state. Even when I try to boot into "Diagnostic Startup" mode which shouldn't load many drivers at all, it hangs at the "Blank screen with spinning dots" phase.
I've tried several restore options:
- the auto-fix startup issues tool runs for about 20 mins then crashes with an error, and doesn't improve anything
- the tool to roll back to a previous configuration seemed to work but no improvement
- I've enabled and looked at the boot log but nothing obvious leaps out at me
- I've disabled Windows Defender as it looked like few of the defender services were having load problems.
All with no improvement.
So it seems to me that some service is having difficulty starting up, but I have no idea which one it is as the boot log file doesn't tell me where it is hanging (a bit frustratingly!). Only what it has loaded successfully.
Any ideas what should be the next step?