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- 772
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- Portsmouth Hants
Stuck at login screen with "Preparing Windows"
Today, I probably did something a little reckless and accidentally wiped out all my partitions on my main Windows 8 /Windows 7/Linux Mint laptop. Now I've been with Windows for yonks, but this has me a little stumped.
Before I realised I had no functional hard drive I didn't worry, I booted up a Windows 8 repair disk, which informed me in diskpart that I had a completely unallocated hard disk. No repair possible.
I dug out a Windows-to-go Usb, downloaded the Minitools partition recovery utility and lo: all my partitions reappeared.
On rebooting, only an old Windows 7 boot menu appeared, without my windows 8.1 option.
I found my windows 8.1 DVD, and booted up until I got to the first install screen where I could press Shift F10 to get a WinPE command prompt, and did a diskpart to check that I could see the boot and system volumes for Windows 8.1 and then issued a bcdboot command to include the windows 8.1 location in the boot menu.
Simple, and on the next boot the graphical Windows 8.1 boot menu appeared with all the options - I haven't used this for years, since there is a bug, anyways preferring the text-based one, for this very reason - the boot screen would not recognize my touchpad. It was not always so - the WTG I had used earlier had no difficulties with a mouse on its graphical boot menu.
So I had to let the menu time out to Windows 8.1 default, and the login screen recognizes my user default, forgets my Picture and sticks on Preparing Windows for 20 minutes before going to a black screen which after an hour I switched off - it repeated this the next time I tried to boot, so after waiting what I considered to be a reasonable time I switched off again, rebooted and interrupted boot-up a couple of times by switching off, since F8 does not work, eventually I had the option to use F9 to boot to Windows 7.
I'm in the middle of a long chkdsk now as Windows 7 boots, and all the disks that I have left dirty by closing down ungraciously are being checked. /rant/
Would anyone like to suggest my next course of action to get windows 8.1 working again, assuming I can boot into Windows 7, or indeed my WTG usb (which is rather slow and is limited to 1 h only since it is a release preview WTG!). I'm knackered, and annoyed, and likely to do something silly on my own. I guess that I should edit the boot menu to default to text based, not Windows 8.1 and to offer safe mode command prompt or some other troubleshooting options. Please point me to the right tutorial.
In a nutshell:
the Immersive boot menu does not find my touchpad pointer, so I cannot navigate away from the default boot entry, and
Windows sticks at the login screen "Preparing Windows" until my screen blanks out - presumably because power saving clicks in - I really don't know what is going on.
Windows 7 does still work! Windows 8 upgraded to 8.1 never had any problems, and the Windows *.1 volume appears healthy from Win7 Explorer.
Today, I probably did something a little reckless and accidentally wiped out all my partitions on my main Windows 8 /Windows 7/Linux Mint laptop. Now I've been with Windows for yonks, but this has me a little stumped.
Before I realised I had no functional hard drive I didn't worry, I booted up a Windows 8 repair disk, which informed me in diskpart that I had a completely unallocated hard disk. No repair possible.
I dug out a Windows-to-go Usb, downloaded the Minitools partition recovery utility and lo: all my partitions reappeared.
On rebooting, only an old Windows 7 boot menu appeared, without my windows 8.1 option.
I found my windows 8.1 DVD, and booted up until I got to the first install screen where I could press Shift F10 to get a WinPE command prompt, and did a diskpart to check that I could see the boot and system volumes for Windows 8.1 and then issued a bcdboot command to include the windows 8.1 location in the boot menu.
Simple, and on the next boot the graphical Windows 8.1 boot menu appeared with all the options - I haven't used this for years, since there is a bug, anyways preferring the text-based one, for this very reason - the boot screen would not recognize my touchpad. It was not always so - the WTG I had used earlier had no difficulties with a mouse on its graphical boot menu.
So I had to let the menu time out to Windows 8.1 default, and the login screen recognizes my user default, forgets my Picture and sticks on Preparing Windows for 20 minutes before going to a black screen which after an hour I switched off - it repeated this the next time I tried to boot, so after waiting what I considered to be a reasonable time I switched off again, rebooted and interrupted boot-up a couple of times by switching off, since F8 does not work, eventually I had the option to use F9 to boot to Windows 7.
I'm in the middle of a long chkdsk now as Windows 7 boots, and all the disks that I have left dirty by closing down ungraciously are being checked. /rant/
Would anyone like to suggest my next course of action to get windows 8.1 working again, assuming I can boot into Windows 7, or indeed my WTG usb (which is rather slow and is limited to 1 h only since it is a release preview WTG!). I'm knackered, and annoyed, and likely to do something silly on my own. I guess that I should edit the boot menu to default to text based, not Windows 8.1 and to offer safe mode command prompt or some other troubleshooting options. Please point me to the right tutorial.
In a nutshell:
the Immersive boot menu does not find my touchpad pointer, so I cannot navigate away from the default boot entry, and
Windows sticks at the login screen "Preparing Windows" until my screen blanks out - presumably because power saving clicks in - I really don't know what is going on.
Windows 7 does still work! Windows 8 upgraded to 8.1 never had any problems, and the Windows *.1 volume appears healthy from Win7 Explorer.
Last edited:
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- System Manufacturer/Model
- HP COMPAQ Presario CQ57
- CPU
- AMD E- 300 APU with Radion HD Graphics 1.30GHz
- Motherboard
- inbuilt
- Memory
- 4GB
- Graphics Card(s)
- ATI
- Sound Card
- High Definition Audio on-board
- Monitor(s) Displays
- notebook
- Screen Resolution
- 1366x768
- Hard Drives
- Seagate ST9500325AS
Google drive 15GB
Skydrive 25GB
BT Cloud
- PSU
- external 20v
- Case
- Laptop
- Cooling
- pretty good
- Keyboard
- inbuilt
- Mouse
- touchpad
- Internet Speed
- BT Infinity Unlimited - 80 up 20 down =70/16 really
- Browser
- Chrome Canary usually
- Antivirus
- Windows Defender and Malwarebytes
- Other Info
- no Start menu modifications
Upgraded with no issues to 8.0 and to 8.1