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I'm trying to understand whether the current state of my Windows 10 PC should be interrupted and force a reboot. I see an arrow cursor on my screen with a black background, and if I move the mouse, the cursor will move also.
My Windows 10 machine froze and needed to be rebooted. It happened twice today, which is somewhat unusual. It prompted me for a checkdisk upon reboot which I accepted. It gets stuck at about 8% or so or then reboots to repeat things again. Once or twice it boots into Windows semi-normally. During those occasions, I could see the Windows desktop screen, but startup icons didn't load properly and I can't start any program (though I can right click the desktop and see some options. Now I only see the arrow icon on the screen (it's been that way for about 30 minutes).
One complicating factor is that the hard disk is almost full (100 gigs of a 2 TB hard drive). (I haven't had the chance to back up to an external drive). I'm assuming that this will complicate a checkdisk/repair action. Also, I just updated Windows 10 earlier today.
So far the arrow icon with a black background has been on my screen for about 30 minutes. I realize that I should wait longer, but how do I know that the checkdisk repair is no longer "doing anything."? Should I just wait until the arrow cursor is frozen?
Also, if I were to force a hard reboot and repeat the process, would the time needed to do checkdisk be reduced by how long it was running that process prior to the reboot?
fyi I did the latest Win 10 update earlier today.... – rjnagle – 2018-05-09T04:47:36.593
I guess my real question is: when you see the arrow cursor with the black background, is it possible that check disk is still running and I need only to wait some more? (Windows warned me that the process will take over an hour) – rjnagle – 2018-05-09T04:52:23.477
@rjnagle Windows 10 updates could also cause this kind of issues. Depending the configuration (software, hardware) updates may cause the system non responsible. Did you try the procedures I stated going thru the task manager? – Luis R Ballestas – 2018-05-09T04:52:28.803
After reboot and Win login (which I didn't see before), I get arrow cursor and black screen (but no check disk messages). This makes me think that I should give more time for Windows to solve things automatically. Worse comes to worse, I could always start in safe mode and do installation repair. This leads me to assume that it's not a hardware problem but simply a Windows update problem (aggravated by not enough storage space) – rjnagle – 2018-05-09T05:13:13.080
(After swapping keyboards, I see that I can access the Task manager options, so I can do a clean restart. That is encouraging. I think a solution will come soon.... Will post updates when I fix it. – rjnagle – 2018-05-09T05:23:14.950
Looks like I probably should have taken your advice to load the hd from another machine and backup or delete files.I ended up doing a RESET PC KEEP FILES. In safe/troubleshooting mode – rjnagle – 2018-05-09T11:00:00.717
Ugh, I figured out how to reinstall from the Lenovo Service Partition and encountered another startup problem the first time I tried to reboot. See https://superuser.com/questions/1322587/right-sequence-for-hardening-windows-against-vulnerabilities-that-persist-after
– rjnagle – 2018-05-14T15:44:58.253