Stuck in startup repair. How long is too long?

If U want to cancel whatever Ur doing .. just keep the Power button pressed for a few secs..and then .. put the Win 7 repair Dvd .. and boot from it .. and go to command prompt

It won't even boot to a disk. The system check went fine though Hard drive passed.

Are you able to boot into Windows normally or even Safe Mode?

If you don't understand anything I write in this thread, then please do not hesitate to ask me to explain it more :)

Thanks all for giving me hope. I woke up to a laptop with a screen frozen on the Win flag. After powering down my computer came up with the startup repair screen. I tried restoring to an earlier point but it did not work. I think I next tried the repair from my hd but it failed too. After searching here I ended up booting up with my recovery disc and launching the startup repair as described here. That was around 11 am EST and it ran all day. After reading here to let it run, I just went about my day and hoped for the best.

At 8 pm and came up to check on my laptop (Sony Vaio) and low and behold it up and open to the user logon screen!!! I logged on and it opened to the exact tabs that I must have left it at yesterday before it went south. It was like it never happened!!!!

I tried the best I could to see what might have happened in the event log. It looked like it finally repaired and rebooted about about 5 pm. I had a Windows update this am and it required a reboot. Somehow something went very wrong when it happened and it froze. I have had many issues with the laptop but mostly with the CPU use and fan so I have been here often for info but never posted.

It looks like the startup repair found and repaired the following:

1. System volume corrupt (what?)
2. Repaired file system errors
3. A software patch prevented the system from restarting (could I find out which one?)
4. Restored system to earlier restore point
5. Repaired corrupted files from the backup

Just prior to these events it looked like all of the Windows updates installed again? I am not sure, but maybe they had to re-install? How knows but now that it is up I shut down the auto update function and the auto-restart with issues function. I have had sooo many issues with Win updates I can not begin to tell you how many times I have been here searching for fixes. This time I got so lucky I just had to say thanks and maybe someone else reading this will get as lucky!

Also if you have not made a recovery dvd or something similar - it is VERY nice to have on hand. I made my right after I bought my laptop and thought I would never need it! Sure glad I had it today!

Just for those looking for a little bit of hope, I have successfully run the startup repair on a 64bit Windows 7 install.

It took about 5 1/2 hours on a 1TB Seagate 7,200rpm HDD that was packed full of bad sectors and at about 70% capacity. It is also worth noting that this had not been my first try.

After the repair it stayed up long enough to extract some critical data that had not been backed up in time which was my primary objective. That may at least give you a single point of reference, but I still would not have been surprised if it had gone over 24 hours.

I have also successfully run the startup repair on Win 7 Pro 64 bit. My startup disk is 2 TB with about 65% full.

Took about 40 minutes but I would advise for most to give it at least a couple of hours, and perhaps more than that if you have the time.

Upon reviewing the Log the root cause was "A recent drive installation or upgrade may be preventing the system from restarting".