Posted on October 15, 2012 by MARTIN TJANDRA2 Comments

Link: Windows 7 Startup Repair Loop (Look for the third and last solution posted by Moab)

Any IT tech guy will someday meet this confusing and frustrating problem:

1. You install deep freeze on a computer.
2. Someday later you thawed boot the computer to install updates.
3. The updates have 2 parts: the one that is installed on the current session of Windows, and the one that has to be installed after boot.
4. The update install the first part in thawed state.
5. And then the machine restarts.
6. While on booting mode, the update install the second one in frozen state.
7. And then before Windows enter the desktop, the machine restarts.
8. Because the second part of the update installed in frozen state, it got abandoned, and the machine restart as though as the second part of the update never installed.
9. Return to step 6.

This is very frustrating, because it’s like locking your house, and then you lost the key, or the key doesn’t working anymore, and it leaves you outside of your house and can’t come in, or locked you inside and can’t come out. It’s like creating a foolproof lock that even you yourself cannot break it when you need to do it. That’s what happened to me today. So I search on the internet for the people who experience same problem like me, and what’s the solution. I’ve tried every possible solution, starting from booting in command prompt and rename the Deep Freeze filename to disables it, up to trying to do system restore, only to realize that I never create any system restore point since I’ve known about Deep Freeze. And in the internet, the solution I found is really not very much. The tech guy in Microsoft simply point at Deep Freeze and just mention to do system restore. And in Deep Freeze’s own website, the problem only mentioned but without any solution (look for number 4443).

Then I found the solution in the link above. It tells me exactly what I’m looking for: how to prevent restart after the updates has been installed. Basically, the steps are:

1. Boot into command prompt.
   You can do whatever way you wish, from press F8 and select safe mode with command prompt, or using Windows setup, open the repair mode, and select command prompt (this is what I do).
2. Locate to C:\WINDOWS\Winsxs.
   You can use CD or CHDIR commands to do this. If you don’t know how, look for them online.
3. Rename or delete the file pending.xml.
   I suggest to rename. I also notice that many people had problems with authorship of the file and “access denied” error message. In my case, I didn’t have any problem about that, so I suggest you follow my way exactly, by enter command prompt through Windows setup.
4. Restart your computer.
5. The computer will redo what it was doing (installs the second part of the updates), but this time, it’s almost guaranteed that after it finishes, it would not restart the computer, but continues to the desktop.
   How this is possible, I also don’t know. From there, you can boot thawed. And finish where the updates has left off.

But if you want to have some insight about what and whatnot to do with pending.xml, some of these articles ma