hp compaq 8710p, windows 10. this thing with automatic repair happened to me and my strong advice is dont rush into anything. please be a little bit patient. it might fix itself. i kept doing hard restarts by holding down the power button till it forced a shutdown, but just ended up with it getting stuck on the preparing....etc message. sometimes not even a message. just the windows loading circle going round and round. eventually i decided to go into the ROM segment by holding f10 on start up. i ran a HDD self test and memory self test. both were ok. so all the talk about a corrupt hard drive might not be correct. i left it overnight tried again in the morning. no joy. i needed to go out. so decided to switch it off at the power supply. when i came back 3 hours later it flipped from auto repair into diagnosing your pc. from there i did a system restore but it was unable to complete it due to a dodgy file. so i exited that and low and behold it booted normally. what a relief. so take from this what you...