Windows 8.1 takes 10-15 minutes to load, then at the password screen freezes and occasionally flickers black.

MachoMuffn

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Aug 20, 2015
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This all started yesterday when i reset my laptop to update. While it was updating before it shut down, the screen froze, then went to my desktop for an hour before i finally shut it down. (i get that it might not have been the best idea to shut down the laptop then, but i was at a loss of what to do.)

Upon bootup, it went to my loading screen (which just shows the laptops brand name, MSI) for about 10 minuites, then went to a blue screen which said:

error 0x0000185
missing file: msrpc.sys
your machine needs to be repaired. Insert installation media....etc.

after several attempts at the auto-repair and system restore (all of which came back as failures) i loaded the windows 8 software onto a flashdrive to do the full repair. this also failed, but it does allow me to get to the password screen.

Now im stuck with the machine taking 10-15 minutes to load from boot, and freezing on the first screen with all the pictures. It will open to the password screen after a few minutes, but the GUI gives no response to any attempts to click either the password box or the shut down button on the screen. Did I get some kind of crazy virus? or did windows just break?
 
Could also be a memory or hard-disk problem, but given that it had an error during update it could be some sort of system corruption. Some of the things you can do are: restart in safe or command prompt only mode (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/windows-startup-settings-safe-mode) and run dism to fix corruptions (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/947821), run automated memory diagnostics provided by your device, try a traditional repair install using the Windows 8 media creation tool.

If the first option works, try to back up your files before attempting recovery just in case.
 
G

Guest

Guest


And the "some sort of system corruption" could be a hard disk problem. I would download a free version of Hard Disk Sentinel and run it in a system where the suspected "bad" hard drive could be connected as a slave drive so it could be checked.

Hard Disk Sentinel: http://www.hdsentinel.com/download.php

I had a similar problem where I could not get Windows auto-repair to work nor could I get the computer out of it's Disk Doctor repair cycle - could not get it to boot into Windows. Luckily, I had checked the drive just prior to that problem with Hard Disk Sentinel and was told that it only had 4% health left. Seeing that I tried to use Windows Disk Doctor to fix sectors and I could never get out of it's continual boot loop of trying to fix itself, failing, and me trying again with the same result, then trying to use Windows Repair, and that failing. This forced me to buy a new SSD where I did a clean install of Windows 8 and was able to connect the failed disk as a slave so I could retrieve data, which worked for that, luckily.