Need help with repairing Windows 10

i would boot off a minimial window install on a usb disk and copy everything off that hard drive first.

eta you might have to break out of the startup sequence into bios and change the preferred boot device to USB first.

shouldn't be too hard.

damn thats a bit harsh.

he's in a bootloop; his hard drive didn't fail. He just needs to boot off a CD or USB drive and copy whatever he wants over.

its likely a reinstall of windows 10 could work or even booting up in safe mode but if he's worried about losting files, boot off usb first and copy everything to a different drive then try reinstalling windows 10.

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Do you have a link to a step by step that will allow me to do this without losing my files?

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a few questions:

- does your computer have a CD/DVD drive?
- do you have the original windows CD that came with your computer or was it a digital download?
- do you have your windows product key handy? (it could be on the inside of your computer or on the manuals that came with it)

if you don't know how to create a bootable Windows 10 image on a USB stick, you can get something like this for $20 on ebay. this is good to have around for situations like this.

if you have a spare computer & usb stick laying around, you can create a backup windows 10 image fairly easily.

to boot of the USB you'll have to catch windows before its booted up. you should see 'press f2 to enter bios' or something like that right after you power the computer on. hit whatever button it tells you to before windows 10 boots.

you'll then see something like this below which will allow you to use the keyboard to move up & down and select the boot drive. then just restart.



once you are booted off that usb stick or CD you should be able to access the internal hard drive that contains your system and just navigate to your files or if you have enough space, just copy the entire disk contents over to an external drive or other USB stick.

then just do a fresh windows 10 install from the usb stick (as long as you have your product key handy) and it may work just fine and you don't lose anything but you'll want to copy them before doing that just in case something goes wrong and you have to reformat the hard drive.

Also, in a worst case scenario you can move your hard drive to an external enclosure and copy files with certain extensions. I did that once with a dead laptop. Only thing I lost was NFL Head Coach because I didn't have the key anymore.

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once you are booted off that usb stick

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Should the computer start up with an "install windows now" prompt? Because that is what popped up on mine. I don't want to install windows and end up deleting all my files.

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copy the entire disk contents over to an external drive or other USB stick.

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To the OP: that is time-consuming but thorough. If you think you may have saved files to some different location (like C:\My Stuff, for example) that is the best way to make sure you don't lose anything but it can easily take hours (depending on how much data you have).

Once you get your system backed up and Windows reinstalled/repaired, do NOT just copy these files back over if you find that your files are no longer there. Doing so will very likely overwrite good files with whatever damaged files the re-install fixed.

If your files are missing browse into your backup to the Users folder, then your profile. The vast majority of your files will be under Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos and Music (also Favorites if you use IE or Edge). You can just copy these folders over to your profile on your C drive.

Example: if my USB thumb drive is E: then I copy ONLY those folders from E:\Users\Bard to C:\Users\Bard.

What I do NOT do is copy all of E:\Users\Bard to C:\Users\Bard because that's copying over a crapton of other things, some of which may be corrupted system files which could have been causing your issues.