Boxstarter keeps rebooting (stuck in boot loop)

[mwrock]

Migrated from https://boxstarter.codeplex.com/workitem/61

Hi there! This is my first time using Boxstarter, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong, but the end result is that the machine keeps restarting, and will do so indefinitely, until I actually go to the desktop and kill the Boxstarter process in between reboots.

A few specifics:
this is a brand new Asus laptop that I just bought for my wife, and it came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed
the Gist that I'm using
I'm trying to do a "Launch from Web", using this URL: http://boxstarter.org/package/url?https://gist.githubusercontent.com/danrochman/13398e4427c1f2c5919e/raw/16c6db0ab488338a2195f5674b74cd33842b876a/boxstarter-efa-asus.txt
Everything seems to work well at first, but then it says "Restart Required", and restarts the machine. As soon as it can, it seems to go through the exact same process again. And again. I have to catch/kill the window in order to get it to stop. I have a (blurry, sorry) photo of the window here. Same window comes up every time.

Happy to share log files or other details - just let me know what (if anything) might be helpful. Thanks!!

[skyguy94]

I have a coworker who has this issue at the moment. We're launching via a gist and then installing from a private feed. He's fairly non-technical and we're trying to sort through the issue remotely. He hasn't been able to kill the window. Its a well tested package, so I'm a bit perplexed. I wish we could grab some logs.

[skyguy94]

Ok, he didn't understand what safe mode was. We finally got past that and got a shared screen going.
The log is here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/374028e9dcd49e59e4c5

DeveloperWorkstation is our boxstarter package.

Apparently this is a Windows 7 SP1 Machine. Its new, but I'm not sure if we ordered it with Win7 or one of my peers modified it.

[skyguy94]

After getting into safe mode and disabling boxstarter, I checked the three keys used to determine if a reboot is pending and they were all clear, so I'm not sure where the reboot was coming from, or why it wouldn't clear. I did not see a pending file rename key.

[mwrock]

In the log just before the restart it will have an entry indicating what prompted the reboot. Looks like this is froom peding rename.

This happened to me once a while back from a Intel driver update gone bad and I had to manually delete the file.

[mwrock]

Look in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

[skyguy94]

Ok, here's a screenshot:

Running a de-ceremonied version of the script: https://gist.github.com/skyguy94/ae12f1c08f552712b959 yielded the results in the console window.

$PSVersionTable shows 2 0 -1 -1

[skyguy94]

Running the registry code by hand yields this:

I'm updating him to Powershell 4 and will try it from that version.

[skyguy94]

Ok, rebooting after installing ps4 shows the "WPRO_41_2001_woem.tmp" file as still pending. Apparently its for "Intel Smart Connect Software". I left it as is for now, but I imagine that uninstalling the software would fix the issue. I found a very old technet article about it here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/0b9efb57-5adb-4399-a968-c2ee1a321baf/how-to-cancel-pending-system-reboot?forum=exchangesvrgenerallegacy

[mwrock]

Sounds really familiar to my experience and I believe I ended up uninstalling the app from intel. It was about a year ago so details are a bit foggy.

[nbarnwell]

I'm having a similar issue now with Google Chrome. After a reboot there's something in that registry entry for pending renames about Chrome.

[skyguy94]

What's the pending file rename look like?

[nbarnwell]

PS C:> get-itemproperty "hklm:\system\currentcontrolset\control\session manager" -Name PendingFileRenameOperations | s
elect -exp PendingFileRenameOperations
??\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\IGT.exe
??\C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\1.3.24.15

I just found this that I'll try in a second for the IGT.exe: https://forum.parallels.com/threads/a-igt-exe-coming-up-as-malicous-object.287791/

On 12 Mar 2015 23:28, "Ritch Melton" [email protected] wrote:

What's the pending file rename look like?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[dragon788]

I'm getting this from a spool process that has a PRTPROCS\x64 dll open. Really annoying since it's a managed server and I can't do much about it, removing the item manually still doesn't get rid of the pending rename. Going to try another reboot manually, but definitely bad to have a server looping from a setup attempt. Would be great to have some detection mechanism in place "unable to run Boxstarter main process after 3 reboots, please check recent updates or run commands in this troubleshooting thread to see what process is causing the failure".

UPDATE: After removing the offending item and rebooting Boxstarter simply failed to start, but this may have been due to how I killed it by terminating the batch in the prior run. Kicking off from the URL again was able to succeed after I verified there were no pending file renames.

[Eternal21]

I don't even remember why I had it installed, but just restarted my win 10 laptop for the first time in many weeks, and it started rebooting like crazy. Didn't know what was causing it, but luckily the cmd window takes a while to execute all its instructions and was able to close it in time on 5 restart. I then removed Boxstarter from the start menu, so hopefully that'll take care of the issue for now.

[lukebal]

I've noticed this Reboot loop behavior with Windows Updates. My Boxstarter package will contain nothing but the function 'Install-WindowsUpdate', and the test machines will get stuck in a reboot loop. There are no pending file rename operations either in the registry. When looking at the Test-Pendingreboot reason, the value points to OneDriveSetup (which I believe is a red herring).
Some Windows Updates will install and Boxstarter will receive the pending reboot notification and reboot the machines. But it gets hung up on one update in particular (in my case its KB4507469). Boxstarter is never able to fully install that update as it keeps thinking a reboot is needed and the machine reboots continuously.
In this case, I am manually installing the KB before the 'Install-WindowsUpdate' function is invoked. By doing this the reboot loop is avoided.
It would be nice to find the root cause of why Boxstarter keeps thinking a reboot is needed before installing this particular KB, when indeed a reboot has already been performed (over 400+ times).

[mwallner]

I've been just checking the issues marked as 'bug' and stumbled over this. To be honest I've got no idea what to do with this, - I am not aware of any recent "infinite reboot loops", also the only scenario where a reboot loop really would be infinite if the Boxstarter package itself would trigger a reboot each and every time...

In theory we could create something like a "maximum reboot count" parameter, set it to 100 by default and give the user an option to overwrite it. (Boxstarter would need to ensure to store it somewhere to in $Boxstarter.dir, but we'd already have everything in place we'd need for that)

what do you think @pauby @flcdrg ?

[flcdrg]

There was #490 which was due to a dodgy audio driver install.

Having some kind of watchdog counter does sound like a good idea though

[pauby]

Agreed.

However, if the reboot loop isn't of Boxstarters making, then the counter is not going to be updated and the loops around going to continue.