"OPerations are in progress..."

[Bill@W]

Could not shut down because screen showed "Operations are in progress, please wait. System will shut down when operations are complete." Left on overnight, message still there, so did a hard reset.
Now system won't boot-- one beep, two flashes of HD activity light then nothing. Power OK. everything spins up.
System is on SSD, everything else on separate HD.
Any suggestions?

Bill Wilson

[kalniel]

System restore, or failing that, windows repair, using your windows install disk.

[ik9000]

were you running a defrag? Can't see why you would on an SSD but a poorly set-up system might have been. Though overnight defrag on an 128GB SSD should have completed....

[peterb]

What operations had you started? Windows updates (if it is a windows system) puts up messages like that, although that is normally fairly safe.

It suggests a hardware failure that prevented whatever operation was in progress from completing successfully, which in turn suggests either at worst a complete SSD failure, at best, some SSD corruption.

If you have a bootable CD of some application, for example Gparted, Memtest, a Linux distro, you could test the rest of the system by seeing if it will boot off that.

[Bill@W]

Thanks tokalniel, br9000, and peterb.
I fear my ssd has gone south.
I had this screen message once before, and I though I had traced it to Acronis True Image (backup software). I had been unaware that the programme defaulted to setting a scheduled incremental backup. I found that the ‘operations in progress’ message came after the timed backup date. I deleted the scheduled backup option. (If I’m right, the software was looking for the backup file to increment, which it was never going to find because it was on an external drive, not connected to the system, and got itself into a loop).
System restore isn’t an option since the system won’t boot. Neither will it boot from an Acronis bootable DVD.
I had run Windows Update the day before but that had completed without a problem. The same day I downloaded two very large Nikon software updates, which I had not yet removed from the Download folder. I use O & O Defrag latest version which knows to avoid SSDs leaving them to the Trim command.
I then tried to boot from the original Windows 7 Pro x64 CD, without anything on screen.
Then something inexplicable: I have two monitors connected; I happened to switch on the 2nd monitor and can see the Windows disc attempting system restore on this screen while the main screen is still getting no signal! A window pops up StartRep.exe. with the message The instruction at [memory address] could not be read. Click OK to terminate the programme. Meanwhile the progress bar on StartUp Repair is moving left to right at a decent clip,
I would be very grateful to anyone who has stayed with this lengthy post if they can come up with an alternative to buying a replacement SSD

BillW

[herulach]

if the system won't boot full stop then thats an issue, but are you sure its not a boot priority problem? Disconnect the second monitor, and tell the bios to explicitly boot from a dvd/memstick and see if it works.

[virtuo]

I've seen this exact problem with a colleague's system (quite a while ago, it was on a Vista laptop and didn't have an SSD), not sure exactly what the issue was, but they followed the guide here (using the the bootrec tool mentioned in the second step):

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...1-185bccf07549

and it apparently got them sorted.

[Bill@W]

Follow-up to previous post, (and solution ).
The Windows 7 OS CD starts in secondary monitor, and from the System Repair option moves to System Restore. As noted above, the StartRep.exe returns The instruction at [memory address] could not be read. The System Restore option finds a recent restore point but then falls over.
Startup repair diagnostics mostly pass successfully (error code 0x0), except two: It finds the windows directory at F:\Windows (which is the optical drive with the Win7 disc) but not at C:\Windows although chkdsk passes. The other failure is System files integrity check and repair, which fails with error code 0x490.
Going to the command prompt and changing the directory to C:\ and running the DOS DIR command, dir says File not found, i.e. there is no Windows directory.
I’ve been using PCs for thirty years and never seen this situation before.
With my juggling the Win7 install disc and Z87 drivers disc, Windows sets about reinstalling itself.
The desktop moved back to the main monitor, and in fact I’m back to where I was two days ago, with everything back where it belongs.

What have I learned? (Apart from the current price of SSDs!)
That my original guess at Acronis backup as the cause of this nightmare was correct. I looked again at the application, to see what had happened to my deletion of a scheduled backup (changed from monthly to never), and found Acronis had changed itself back to a monthly backup.

I’ll uninstall this programme tomorrow, and bin it.

Thanks to everyone on Hexus, even if I laboured to the solution myself this time.

Bill Wilson

[peterb]

Glad you got it sorted. Strange one!