System Restore seems to have stalled.

[AvgOrdinaryGuy]

My Windows 10 (in place upgrade from 7) system has been freezing up on my for the past two weeks.  SFC /SCANNOW has not uncovered any errors, so I decided to do a system restore to a point in time before the problems started.

Yesterday, I ran System Restore, and after the "Finished" dialog was on screen for 3 hours, I assumed it has stalled and I powered the PC down.  Upon restarting Win10 alerted me that System Restore failed to complete and changes had not been applied.  So I re-started the System Restore process this AM at about 9:00, went away for a few hours, and checked in on it at 2PM when the restore process was still running.  Sometime after 2PM the System Restore dialog box has been displaying "Finished" with a solid green progress bar for about an hour and a half.  How long should I expect to wait for the restore process to complete?  Does it usually take 8 hours?  12?  24 hours, or what?

[NoelC]

Are you starting System Restore from the Win Recovery environment (i.e., by going through the Advanced Boot menu)?  In past versions of Windows I always found that to be more reliable.

I haven't tried a System Restore lately on Win 10 build 14393.351.  Thanks for the reminder that I should test that - as well as backup.

-Noel

[AvgOrdinaryGuy]

Yes, I'm starting System Restore from the Win Recovery environment.

This morning, after the restore process had been running for 24hrs, Windows had finally crashed completely.  The circle of spinning dots had stopped spinning, and even the mouse was unresponsive.  So I held power button to power down, and once restarted, it booted to the desktop and displayed an error window stating that System Restore had failed and no file had been changed.  It offered to continue the process from the desktop (which I tried), but Windows crashed again soon after, and I had to leave for work.

On my return, I tried booting the Windows 10 installation DVD to attempt to "Reset this PC", keeping all my files and reinstalling Windows.  Soon after starting the process Windows reports "There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made.  I guess next step will be to format the HDD and install anew from scratch.