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On Tuesday, shortly after I logged into Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, I noticed that Explorer was frozen. The applications that I already had open continued to work, but I couldn't use Explorer. I tried restarting it from Task Manager, but that didn't work, so I rebooted my PC.

My PC went right into a reboot loop - about 1/2 second after reaching the Windows logo, it restarted. After this happened a few times, it would go into Automatic Repair (which failed). I tried Startup Repair, which failed, and ended up fixing the issue by using System Restore. My PC was fine for the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday.

This morning, the exact same thing happened as on Tuesday morning. Only, the Restore Point I used last time is gone now, and apparently that was my only restore point.

I did not install any new software or Windows Updates in the last few days.

I have tried all of these things multiple times, some of them more than 10 times:

  • Startup Repair ("Startup Repair couldn't repair your PC". From the logs, it doesn't look like it's able to find a problem).
  • Using CHKDSK, SFC, and DISM to scan the drive for errors (yes, I know the correct commands for finding/scanning/repairing the correct drive from the Recovery Environment). None of those utilities detects any errors.
  • Reformatting/Repairing/Rebuilding the boot manager with DISKPART, BOOTREC, and BCDBOOT
  • Uninstalling Windows Updates ("We ran into a problem and won't be able to uninstall...")
  • Booting with Safe Mode or any of the other Startup Settings (still goes into reboot/repair loop)
  • Checking UEFI settings (all correct)
  • Putting Installation Media on a USB drive and booting from that, and trying all of the above options from the Installation Media's Recovery Environment
  • Browsing the files on the Windows drive to see if there is anything obviously missing
  • Skimming through the registry in REGEDIT to see if there is anything obviously wrong
  • Disconnecting all external devices except my mouse, keyboard, and monitor
  • Looking through all of the log files I can think of for relevant info
  • Disconnecting secondary drives
  • Removing either one of the two RAM sticks
  • Check SMART data from a Linux bootable USB

I've exhausted all of the options I can think of or find online. I don't want to do a Reset installation if I can avoid it, because then I'll have to spend the next 20 hours downloading, installing, and configuring all my software again.

What really has me frustrated is that Windows is not giving me any kind of error message and I can't find any crash dump or other log file with any information about what's going wrong. Is there any way to determine what kind of error is causing Windows to always restart when it reaches the Windows logo?

  • Windows 10 Pro 64-bit 21h2
  • UEFI
  • M2 SSD (primary drive)
  • 2xSATA SSD (secondary drives)
  • Bitlocker on all drives (I'm so sick of typing in the recovery key for the main drive...)
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  • None of my documents are on the primary drive, so they aren't a concern. I just don't want to spend several days babysitting my PC while downloading and installing (often multiple versions of) Unity, Visual Studio, Python, Blender, WebStorm, NetBeans, everything in Creative Cloud, SourceTree, VirtualBox, Vagrant, LibreOffice, and all of the other software I use on a regular basis.
    – Kevin
    Sep 16, 2022 at 6:26

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Does sound a bit like a hardware failure.

Have a look at the SMART data for the SSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. (if you can't even get into Safe mode you might need to make Linux USB boot drive to collect this data)

Try MemTest86 to test the RAM.

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  • I don't think it's hardware. SMART shows no issues. The system has two RAM sticks; if I remove either one and boot, the symptoms are the same. Also, hardware would not explain why System Restore was able to fix the issue the first time.
    – Kevin
    Sep 16, 2022 at 19:00
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If you can get into the Auto-repair window, can you get a command line prompt. From the command line prompt can you enable boot logging using bcd.

bcdedit /set {identifier} bootlog Yes

Where {identifier} can be found with just the bcdedit command.

Log should then be saved to C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt

Log might give a hint of what is going wrong (e.g. which driver or DLL got loaded just before the crash)

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    Thanks, I tried that, but it didn't generate a log file.
    – Kevin
    Sep 20, 2022 at 1:44
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I gave up and did a Reset installation of Windows. My internet connection is faster than the last time I had to do this, and I wasn't shy about running multiple installers at the same time, so it went faster than I expected - around 6 hours to install and configure the software that I use most frequently. It will take a few more hours to set up the rest of my software, but should still be significantly less than the 20 hours I had anticipated.

There definitely was not a hardware issue, because the new installation is running perfectly.

A tip for those with Bitlocker - to save yourself from typing in your drive key hundreds of times, you can suspend Bitlocker from the command line without decrypting your drive, and just re-enable Bitlocker again once you have the OS back up and running.

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