IRQL - Blue screen - endless restart loop

Recovery from an endless restart /automatic restart loop.

Hi, I foolishly accepted a Wifi driver update from Windows update, and next restart gave me the traditional blue screen IRQL_not_less_than_or_equal.

So (as usual in my experience) Win 8 went into its automatic repair restart loop, collecting data, restart.. to no avail.

I thought - ok- safe mode. Oh, no F8 (thought I'd enabled that some time back), no boot menu (that's now added).

Ok, Win 8 bootable DVD. Hello, no Startup options after Advanced options. Hmm. That was unexpected.

Ok.. System Restore... yes, 2 restore points (I have a daily scheduled system restore point automatically generated). Oh dear, unexpected prompt about drive needing to be checked. That done, no system restore points.

Ok, what am I left? Ah, Aomei Backupper diskimage. Yep, just 3 days old. Boot disk, external drive, 30 minutes or so, done. Working again.

So what's the issue? Well, I don't understand why Safe Mode (Startup options) weren't available when booting from the Win 8 DVD. Any thoughts? Thanks.

It also seems to me that the restart in the automatic repair sequence is subtly different to restarting from having disconnected power.

So I've now enabled F8 (it's a 5 year old laptop, so no UEFI etc) and added a boot menu with Safe Mode (thanks Brink). (Oh, I also realised I didn't have my daily ERUNT registry backup on this- great for restoring a registry from a boot disk..when nothing else is available).

You said it yourself that you installed a wifi driver prior to your system crashing. That's the likely cause.

Hi, sorry, should have made it clearer- or given a different title.

"So what's the issue? Well, I don't understand why Safe Mode (Startup options) weren't available when booting from the Win 8 DVD. Any thoughts? Thanks."

Maybe it's due to the fact that your computer started automatically booting up from the boot disc and therefore it was impossible for you to do such a thing.

Maybe I was assuming 'Startup options' would be available from the boot disk, as in doing SHIFT RESTART from the charms bar in normal mode which eventually allows you an incredibly circuitous route to Safe Mode. It seems it's not.. but this seems one way to get to Safe mode from a Win 8 boot disk - eventually.

https://www.cloudtec.ch/blog/tech/start-windows-8-legacy-safe-mode-windows-install-dvd.html

So what worries me about Win 8.1 is
a. I've seen this endless recovery loop several times in different circumstances- it's an attempt to offer a solution which rarely works.
b. Getting to safe mode is now incredibly convoluted and deters all but the most determined
c. You need to make more advance preparation for boot problems than with previous editions of Windows
d. Therefore there's a greater probability that more people will end up reinstalling than fixing a problem.

I do hope there's some improvement on this in Win 10...

Actually, for fixing boot problems I prefer to use a boot cd like BartPE or something like that.

It depends on the problem. In this case I wanted to use system restore, but somehow even lost the two restore points (as per my post). I'm not sure how a boot CD would let you uninstall a driver... When I had ERUNT set up to do a daily registry backup, a boot CD was useful to restore a backup.. not ideal, but it worked.

Another peculiarity I've noted about Win 8 automatic repair is that it can report it was unable to fix the problem, yet when I tried rebooting, problem was fixed.

You would be able to boot your PC up with a live disc and manually prevent that particular driver from booting up.
Yes, I've experienced that quite a few times. It probably does fix something, but not all of the problems it detects and so it reports that it was unable to carry out the repairs.

Have you come across this?
Registry Backup
I had this set up to run regular backups, but wasn't familiar with restoration from a boot disk using that particular program then.

- ERUNT is rather out of date- this does what autoexec.bat did if I recall- schedules a backup, allows you to set how many backups.

The backup created also includes a .cmd file, which allows you to restore the registry backup. However, according to the video, this is only valid using a windows recovery console or similar- a video shows manual copying the registry using a boot CD. That's a considerable backward step from ERUNT. I'll have to see how well this fits with Win 8.

At the time, I couldn't be certain it was the Wifi Driver that caused the problem, probably having installed 3+ things since a restart (I use hibernate habitually) so some sort of restore seemed preferable to somewhat arbitrarily fiddling with one particular driver.

No, I haven't. If I backup, I mostly use either Norton Ghost or Acronis, AOMEI from time to time. They are all W8(.1) compatible.
And I agree that that backuper is a step back.