Boot Loop

I have a problem that I'm hoping someone can help me with. I have a laptop that's been running fine, but yesterday, I noticed it was off (I usually have it running). When I tried turning it on, the screen comes up and says attempting automatic repairs, then the screen goes blank and it reboots and does the same thing.

The bad thing is my desktop is not running because I'm in the process of building a new one, so I don't have another Windows PC to create a boot drive. On top of this, I just finished moving and can't find my boot recovery disk or my Windows 10 disk. All I have access to are my Android tablets, an Android phone, and an iMac so my options for creating a new boot drive or USB drive are slim.

I know Windows used to have an option when booting to press F8 or F9 (I forgot which one because it's been a long time since I've had to use it), but this would allow someone to boot to the advanced startup repair, where someone could try pull up a restore point and some other options. Is this option not available anymore? If not, can anyone tell me if I could download a Windows ISO file and create a Windows 10 bootable USB on an iMac? I've never used this iMac before. My daughters use it for school since their school is Apple Certified. I don't know if it could create a bootable USB that would be compatible with my laptop running Windows 10.

If anyone has any advice, I'd love to hear it. I can't believe I'm even in this position right now. I usually have an older laptop or something laying around, but we got rid of a lot of junk when we moved. Right now, that junk would come in handy. Thanks.

Hi there. I had this problem once. It ended up being a corrupt MBR (Master Boot Record).

What model iMac are you using?

You can get Windows 10 ISO with Windows 10 Media Creation utility.

"Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive for Windows 10 on MAC OS X"

It's a 2017 iMac 27" 5K Retina 3.4Ghz All in One, well, that's what the description says. I don't know much about Macs.

Thanks for the link FreeBooter! I'll try doing this to create a boot drive. I've been keeping my laptop on the coffee table until my new office furniture arrives. I had to negotiate with my daughters about something which resulted in us adopting a new kitten, and I've found her a couple of times sleeping on my keyboard because I forgot to shut my laptop, so who knows what happened. She could have stepped on the right keys to remove my partition as far as I know. I'm just glad I keep my OS on one drive and keep all my data on a separate drive.

Time to fire up the iMac. Hopefully my daughters didn't set themselves up as administrators and lock me out. 😁

Very funny @rolldog.
Your computer could have corrupted NTFS file system when you create bootable Windows 10 boot your computer with it and try restore Windows OS to a date when computer was working also execute Chkdsk command.

Please boot your computer with Windows Setup Media and from Windows Recovery Environment start the Command Prompt.

Please type below command into Command Prompt and press Enter key.

Following command will fixes errors on the disk and locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.

Code:

Chkdsk D: /r

Please replace partition letter D: with Windows installed partition letter. When computer boots into Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) environment the drive letter assign to Windows partition may not be C: drive letter because Windows 7, 8 , 8.1 and 10 creates a separate system partition when it's installed from scratch. The system partition contains boot files WinRE assigns the system partition the C: drive letter and the Windows installed partition will be assign any other drive letter usually D: drive letter is assign to Windows installed partition. The Bcdedit /enum | find "osdevice" command can be use to find out the drive letter of the Windows installed partition the output of the Bcdedit command is similar to this osdevice partition=D:. The drive letter after partition= is the drive letter of the Windows partition.