I turned on my HP Spectre laptop today, and it got stuck on the HP logo with a spinning circle. I waited for an hour, but nothing changed. When I performed a hard shutdown, it went into 'preparing automatic repair,' but after 10 minutes, it said there was a problem and restarted, returning to the same stuck screen. I attempted some tests with the Esc key, and everything checked out fine. I even tried updating my BIOS using Windows + B, but that didn't help either. I'm really struggling here; any advice?
1 Answer
There could be a few things going wrong here. It’s possible that the boot area of your internal drive is corrupted, which can cause the system to get stuck in that repair loop. Another possibility is that your internal drive might have a hardware issue that could require replacement. If the first option is the issue, you might want to try using software like Macrium Reflect to create a bootable recovery USB drive. Boot from that and select 'Repair Windows boot' to see if it helps. If it’s the internal drive causing problems, you could remove it, use a USB to NVMe adapter to connect it to another working computer, and back up your data if it’s still accessible. Sometimes, a connected external drive with a bootable partition could interfere too, but that’s less common.
I did run the hard drive test, and it came back fine. Does that mean my SSD or hardware isn’t the problem?