Preparing automatic repair

mdmtair · 28 Dec 2020

Hello,

I have a Dell WIN10 PC that froze up a week ago. Now it constantly boots up into "preparing automatic repair". I have tried the hard reset (power on & off 3x) but I never get to any sort of menu where I can try a repair. Yesterday I created a bootable USB and followed the instructions from the preparing automatic repair thread but nothing happens. If I hit F12 when the PC boots I can get into the boot mode menu. I do see the USB1 Windows stick that I created under the UEFI options. If I select that I was advised to turn off secure boot. My selections under boot mode are Legacy boot mode, secure boot off and UEFI boot mode, secure boot off. Neither works. If I run the diagnostics under boot mode all the hardware checks out fine. How can I get this PC fixed? It does not seem to want to load the image I have on the USB stick.

dalchina · 29 Dec 2020

It does not seem to want to load the image I have on the USB stick.

- how did you prepare it? It's easy to get this wrong. And what sort of bootable disk is it? A live boot disk? Win 10 install disk?

Suitable instructions for preparing one can be found here:
Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10
- but use an appropriate iso file (Options 2,4,5).

First check your system disk.

Please try preparing a live boot disk such as
Kyhi's live boot disk]
Bob Omb's live boot disk
(Google)

Boot your PC from that, and use utilities on those to check your internal system disk.

Otherwise remove your system disk, put it in a caddy, attach to another PC and hence check it.

If necessary you can also use the live boot disk to help you recover data not backed up.

Try Crystal Diskinfo (free) - portable version available.
Macrorit Diskscanner
Hard Disk Sentinel (excellent) - SSDs too.

No point trying to fix an O/S if the disk is duff- we don't know anything about it yet.

Matthew Wai · 29 Dec 2020

BOOTPE.iso (598.8 MB)

I use the above Windows PE. The following batch script also works for creating a WinPE device although it is intended for Windows installation.

Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10

mdmtair · 29 Dec 2020

dalchina said:

- how did you prepare it? It's easy to get this wrong. And what sort of bootable disk is it? A live boot disk? Win 10 install disk?

Suitable instructions for preparing one can be found here:
Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10
- but use an appropriate iso file (Options 2,4,5).

First check your system disk.

Please try preparing a live boot disk such as
Kyhi's live boot disk]
Bob Omb's live boot disk
(Google)

Boot your PC from that, and use utilities on those to check your internal system disk.

Otherwise remove your system disk, put it in a caddy, attach to another PC and hence check it.

If necessary you can also use the live boot disk to help you recover data not backed up.

Try Crystal Diskinfo (free) - portable version available.
Macrorit Diskscanner
Hard Disk Sentinel (excellent) - SSDs too.

No point trying to fix an O/S if the disk is duff- we don't know anything about it yet.

I used the link you have above to create the boot USB. It was a standard 16G USB as the instructions do not mention that it has to be any sort of special disk. What I don't understand is that if I do F12 on bootup and tell the system to boot from the USB why it is not working.

- - - Updated - - -

mdmtair said:

I used the link you have above to create the boot USB. It was a standard 16G USB as the instructions do not mention that it has to be any sort of special disk. What I don't understand is that if I do F12 on bootup and tell the system to boot from the USB why it is not working.

Unfortunately I used option 1. Not sure why they would have that listed if it does not use the correct ISO file

Matthew Wai · 29 Dec 2020

Did you try the one in my post #3 above?

dalchina · 30 Dec 2020

Well, you first have to create the drive correctly so it is bootable. Please confirm you used Rufus or the command line instructions in the tutorial. Simply copying an iso file to a USB flash drive makes it a data disk- some people do that. At present I don't know for certain how you prepared it.

This may help: the Tutorial section has lots of useful tutorials.

Boot from USB Drive on Windows 10 PC

One way to make sure you have a bootable USB drive to elimnate that problem is to use the MS media creation tool (Google) to create a bootable Win 10 drive.

After that it may be a matter of BIOS configuration.

Matthew Wai · 30 Dec 2020

The OP wrote "I used option 1".
This is Option One

mdmtair · 04 Jan 2021

dalchina said:

- how did you prepare it? It's easy to get this wrong. And what sort of bootable disk is it? A live boot disk? Win 10 install disk?

Suitable instructions for preparing one can be found here:
Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10
- but use an appropriate iso file (Options 2,4,5).

First check your system disk.

Please try preparing a live boot disk such as
Kyhi's live boot disk]
Bob Omb's live boot disk
(Google)

Boot your PC from that, and use utilities on those to check your internal system disk.

Otherwise remove your system disk, put it in a caddy, attach to another PC and hence check it.

If necessary you can also use the live boot disk to help you recover data not backed up.

Try Crystal Diskinfo (free) - portable version available.
Macrorit Diskscanner
Hard Disk Sentinel (excellent) - SSDs too.

No point trying to fix an O/S if the disk is duff- we don't know anything about it yet.

I am able to run diagnostics from F12 on boot and it runs a 1 hour check on the hard drive and says it is fine. The issue I am having now is that I create the bootable USB but there is no ISO file on it, so when I use Rufus it does not see an ISO file. I have done this 2x now with the same exact results. I download the WIN10 ISO file. Option #2 (using RUFUS) has a link to "download a WIN10 ISO file. In this link are 6 selections, I used #1 and when I download the MCT and put it on my desktop and run it. I follow the instructions and everything goes fine until I get to the "select which media to use" I need to use a USB stick. The instructions say ISO file but it needs to be burned to a DVD. If I select USB and everything installs to it, RUFUS does not see an ISO file on the USB. If I select ISO file, it says to open a DVD burner, which I do not have.

dalchina · 05 Jan 2021

Thank you for your reply.

See 2nd para of mine where the tutorial includes 3 ways to prepare a boot disk, including Rufus.

You do not put the iso file on the bootable disk. That would be just a data disk.

The bootable disk is prepared using the iso file which is held somewhere else.

MCT- choice of medium- see the tutorial again, screenshots 5-8.

mdmtair · 06 Jan 2021

dalchina said:

Well, you first have to create the drive correctly so it is bootable. Please confirm you used Rufus or the command line instructions in the tutorial. Simply copying an iso file to a USB flash drive makes it a data disk- some people do that. At present I don't know for certain how you prepared it.

This may help: the Tutorial section has lots of useful tutorials.

Boot from USB Drive on Windows 10 PC

One way to make sure you have a bootable USB drive to elimnate that problem is to use the MS media creation tool (Google) to create a bootable Win 10 drive.

After that it may be a matter of BIOS configuration.

Ok I tried to use RUFUS. In RUFUS step # 1 is to download a WIN10 ISO file. I follow that link and #1 says to download WIN10 Home or Pro using the MCT. This is what I have done 5x now to no avail. Like I had mentioned previously when I have it downloaded. It asks you to RUN it, should I not do that? The MCT is on my desktop, what is next?

- - - Updated - - -

dalchina said:

Thank you for your reply.

See 2nd para of mine where the tutorial includes 3 ways to prepare a boot disk, including Rufus.

You do not put the iso file on the bootable disk. That would be just a data disk.

The bootable disk is prepared using the iso file which is held somewhere else.

MCT- choice of medium- see the tutorial again, screenshots 5-8.

Ok so I don't put the ISO file on the disk, got it. I downloaded RUFUS, I then downloaded the ISO file and followed the procedure. Ran RUFUS selected the .iso file. It completed just fine. The drive shows as ESD-ISO and has about 5G of info on it. I put it on the broken PC (made sure that secure boot was off) and powered up and it went right to "preparing automatic repair". Is there anything under UEFI options on the broken PC I need to set? Should the USB stick show up under the UEFI options? Looking at the USB on my laptop is shows the file system as NTFS. In the procedure for RUFUS one step shows you doing ALT + E, that did not seem to do anything. Should I have seen something?