Help! Infinite boot loop with no safe mode!

[LoneWolf121188]

All of a sudden my PC got itself into an infinite boot loop. I've never quite seen this one before...it shows the windows logo, then the screen goes black like its about to show the login screen, then restarts. No BSOD. If I try safe mode, it does show a BSOD, but it's so brief I can't read it before it restarts. If I use the "disable automatic restart on failure" (in the F8 menu), it shows the windows logo, then goes black and just stays there. The Repair Console works fine. I've run chkdsk and the memory diagnostic tool and both check out. When I run the startup diagnostics, it says everything is fine and windows has been booting normally.

Obviously I've gotten rid of my OC and reverted to defaults. Is there any way to both boot into safe mode and disable automatic restarts, so I can at least see the BSOD?

 

[Noshei]

I would suggest getting a camera and either taking video of the BSOD or snapping as many stills as you can before it is gone. I've had to do this plenty of times and generally works the best.

Also you may want to try the windows repair utility, could be a corrupted file in the system somewhere.

I would also suggest killing and recreating your boot config, I've seen some very strange results when parts of that get corrupted.

Edit: oh also Hirens Boot Disk is amazing and has a ton of great utilities, I suggest using that if you aren't.

 

[LoneWolf121188]

The startup repair utility says there's nothing wrong. What do you mean by "killing your boot config"?

I'll try the video trick and Hirens, thanks!

One more weird thing: bootrec.exe says its not detecting any windows installations.

 

[Noshei]

The startup repair utility says there's nothing wrong. What do you mean by "killing your boot config"?

I'll try the video trick and Hirens, thanks!

One more weird thing: bootrec.exe says its not detecting any windows installations.

You can delete and recreate the boot partition/sector/config from bootrec.exe.

The problem though is that a generic windows disk usually doesn't have the drivers for raid configurations. So if you are using a raid you may need to load those into the windows repair utility when it is booting (I had to do this from a floppy a couple months ago).

Even if your not using a raid for your boot device I would still check if the vendor has windows drives for it and try those out. Drivers are usually the cause of a windows install not showing up in bootrec.exe.

 

[LoneWolf121188]

Sooooo....it fixed itself. Well, actually, I let it reboot a bunch of times, and all of a sudden I got a message saying "windows restarted because of an error, would you like to launch startup repair?" (Or something to that effect, anyway). So I did, and ran it, and it thought for a while, then I restarted. Then it worked. Wtf.

I did manage to get a video of the BSOD though (awesome trick!). It was:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The initial session process or system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x0000001 (0xc00000034 0x00010678).
The system has been shut down.

Thoughts? Any idea what happened?

 

[Noshei]

take a look at your system log in Event Viewer, that may give a better indication.

 

[LoneWolf121188]

What am I looking for? I see a bunch of warnings from Kernel-PnP, saying "The driver \Driver\AiChargerPlus failed to load for the device PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1E2D&SUBSYS_84CA1043&REV_04\3&11583659&0&D0." There's also a few errors about Symantec not being able to load definitions or the antivirus driver. I don't see anything that would cause a fatal error...

 

[Noshei]

yeah neither of those seem likely. Most likely it will be a single entry just prior to the first time the computer crashed, though a lot of the time the computer doesn't have the ability to log a fatal error crash.