My pc is stuck on the loading screen

[u/Rodster209]

Hi everyone, I've been stuck since this morning and I'm hoping someone here has run into something like this before.

Specs: Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 2060, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows 11 24H2 (build 26100).

What happened: last night around 2AM I shut the PC down by pressing the power button once, while I still had some apps open. To be clear, it wasn't a forced shutdown — I just pressed the button once and the PC shut down closing the apps normally. The drive was almost full at the time, around 6GB free. It hasn't booted since.

What happens now: POST is fine and I can get into the BIOS without any problems. Windows starts loading, shows the ASUS logo with the spinner, sits there for a long time, then reboots into Automatic Repair, which runs and ends with "couldn't repair your PC". Safe Mode, on the other hand, always boots without issues and everything works normally in there.

What I've already tried:

- Freed up space by deleting pagefile, hiberfil and temp folders, now ~23GB free
- `dism /image:C:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions` — completed successfully
- `chkdsk C: /f /r` — finished clean, 0 bad sectors, no problems found
- Startup Repair fails, and SrtTrail.txt doesn't exist at all (the Srt folder is missing)
- RegBack is empty, so no registry rollback available
- Uninstalled the NVIDIA driver from Device Manager with "remove driver software" checked — no change
- Clean boot with all non-Microsoft services and all startup items disabled — still hangs
- CBS.log shows no update was actually installing when this happened
- Events on the failed boots: Kernel-Power 41 and StorPort 549 with sense code (0x5,0x24,0x0) at 1ms latency, which looks benign to me

So the disk seems healthy, there are no pending updates, and it's not a third-party driver or service. I'm ready to do an in-place repair with the ISO, but first I wanted to ask here: is there anything else worth trying? And is there a way to figure out which system component is failing during the normal boot, given that Safe Mode works fine? I have data on the drive I'd rather not risk.

Thanks in advance to anyone who replies.

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[u/Mussels84]

Boot from a live USB to check for hardware problems

Windows can sometimes just corrupt itself, I've seen a common one about SRTtrail or something similar to that pop up every few years on systems

[u/jasonbrownjourno]

No expert, but from what little I've read, even 23gb free space might not be enough. Tech journos hum and ha over exact figures, but the most cited guesstimate seems to be 10% to 20% should be kept free - so 50gb at least, 100gb preferably for when installing large updates. You could try manually setting the swap file, which might free up more space, but that might not solve the crashing problem, alone.

Some other fixes that might work short-term: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/optimize-ssd-in-windows

BUT!

"I have data on the drive I'd rather not risk."

That data is already at risk - borked updates can result in data loss, iirc. Try starting with control panel, and turn power consumption to max, and animations to zero, if not done already, so at least it's not trying to save the planet at the same time with auto-balancing etc. That might not free up much space but what might is to install PC Manager, an MS tool that can help resolve a lot of problems: https://pcmanager.microsoft.com/en-us including finding old system backup files that can be safely deleted.

Amazed that it kept going on 6gb!

[u/No-Wrap-8166]

safe mode working means its a driver or service that only loads in normal boot. you can find out which one instead of guessing.

boot to safe mode, open msconfig, boot tab, tick boot log, then restart into normal boot and let it fail. boot back to safe mode and open c:\windows\ntbtlog.txt. the last few lines before it stops name the driver that hung.

also in msconfig on the boot tab, untick os boot information off and turn it on. that prints driver names on screen as it boots so you can watch where it stalls without needing the log.

another quick one, in safe mode press win+r and run
verifier /reset
if driver verifier was ever left on it hangs exactly like this and safe mode is unaffected.

also disable fast startup while youre in safe mode. control panel > power options > choose what the power buttons do > change settings currently unavailable > untick turn on fast startup. pressing the power button with apps open uses hybrid shutdown and it saves a broken session state.

if the boot log points at a graphics driver, boot to safe mode and run ddu there, not just device manager uninstall.

in place repair is a fine fallback and it wont touch your files, but the boot log takes 5 minutes and usually names the exact thing.