this thing with automatic repair happened to me and my strong advice is dont rush into anything. please be a little bit patient. it might fix itself.
i kept doing hard restarts by holding down the power button till it forced a shutdown, but just ended up with it getting stuck on the preparing....etc message. sometimes not even a message. just the windows loading circle going round and round.
eventually i decided to go into the ROM segment by holding f10 on start up.
i ran a HDD self test and memory self test. both were ok. so all the talk about a corrupt hard drive might not be correct. i left it overnight tried again in the morning. no joy.
i needed to go out. so decided to switch it off at the power supply. when i came back 3 hours later it flipped from auto repair into diagnosing your pc. from there i did a system restore but it was unable to complete it due to a dodgy file. so i exited that and low and behold it booted normally. what a relief.
so take from this what you will. try unplugging everything for a few hours or overnight. see what happens. you might be lucky too ;))
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=== Update (04/15/2017) ===
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update on my post; it wasn't so much switching off the electrical supply that fixed it.
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it was removing a SANDISK HD memory card from the card reader that solved it.
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i didn't remember that i'd done that first time. but when the problem resurfaced, thats what i did to solve it.
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so the motto is; first make sure all usb and card readers are empty before doing anything drastic.
hp compaq 8710p, windows 10.
this thing with automatic repair happened to me and my strong advice is dont rush into anything. please be a little bit patient. it might fix itself.
i kept doing hard restarts by holding down the power button till it forced a shutdown, but just ended up with it getting stuck on the preparing....etc message. sometimes not even a message. just the windows loading circle going round and round.
eventually i decided to go into the ROM segment by holding f10 on start up.
i ran a HDD self test and memory self test. both were ok. so all the talk about a corrupt hard drive might not be correct. i left it overnight tried again in the morning. no joy.
i needed to go out. so decided to switch it off at the power supply. when i came back 3 hours later it flipped from auto repair into diagnosing your pc. from there i did a system restore but it was unable to complete it due to a dodgy file. so i exited that and low and behold it booted normally. what a relief.
so take from this what you will. try unplugging everything for a few hours or overnight. see what happens. you might be lucky too ;))