A customer from the Kirk Brae side of Liberton brought a two-year-old Dell down to the workshop last month after what he described as an afternoon lost to Windows. The laptop had been running slowly, he had read online that “Reset This PC” was the modern equivalent of a reinstall, and he had started one over his lunch break. By the time he came back from a meeting the screen was showing “There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made” and a Windows that would no longer boot normally.
That is the common shape of this complaint. Reset This PC is the single most-pressed recovery button in Windows and also the one most likely to leave a machine in a worse state than it started in. This post is a bench-level walk-through of what is actually happening when the reset fails, what you can safely try from a Liberton living room before the laptop reaches the workshop, and the honest signs that the storage drive underneath Windows is the real fault rather than anything you can fix inside the operating system.
What “Reset This PC” Is Actually Doing Under the Bonnet
The Reset This PC option in Settings looks like a single friendly button, but under the surface it is a full reinstall of Windows from either a hidden recovery image on the laptop or a fresh copy pulled down from Microsoft’s cloud. The “Keep my files” path copies your personal folders to the side, wipes the Windows partition, reinstalls the operating system and copies the files back. The “Remove everything” path skips the copy step. Either way, the critical move in the middle is the same — a wipe and a reinstall onto the same drive, in the same machine.
That matters because every failure mode starts with the question “at what stage did it break?”. A reset that falls over before it starts wiping is a software problem. A reset that falls over partway through, with the drive already wiped and the reinstall half-written, is a completely different situation, because the previous Windows is already gone and the recovery tooling now has nothing to roll back to.
The Error Patterns We See on the Bench Most Often
Four shapes of failure account for the great majority of Liberton reset calls that reach the workshop.
“There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made.” This one is the friendliest version, because Windows is telling the truth — it detected a problem before it started wiping, and the laptop is still in the state it was before you pressed the button. The usual causes are a corrupted system file in the Windows image, a pending Windows update that has not finished, a third-party antivirus or disk-encryption tool that has its hooks into the recovery environment, or missing or corrupted files on the hidden recovery partition itself. Nothing is lost, but you cannot reset until the underlying cause is cleared.
“Couldn’t complete the reset. No changes were made” after a long progress circle. This is the same family of fault but caught later in the sequence — usually when the recovery environment tries to pull a fresh Windows image down from the cloud and the download hits a corrupted update server state, or when the laptop runs out of space on the system partition while unpacking the image. The laptop reboots back into normal Windows, often with no obvious damage, and the reset button will refuse to try again until the cause is cleared.
A reset that boots back into Automatic Repair, over and over. This is the version we see most often from customers who tried “Remove everything”. The wipe has run, the reinstall has started, and something in the sequence has failed partway through — most often a bad sector on the drive, a cable that is not seating properly, or a laptop battery that cut out during the write. The machine now boots to a “Preparing Automatic Repair” screen, loops, and ends up back at the recovery options. The previous Windows is already gone.
A reset that completes but boots to a blank or BitLocker-locked machine. This is the one that catches modern Windows 11 laptops out. The reset has technically completed, but the drive encryption key stored against the old install is now out of sync with the new one, and the laptop asks for a BitLocker recovery key you did not know existed. If the laptop was signed in with a Microsoft account the key is usually in that account’s security dashboard — if it was a local account, the key may be lost. We cover the ground around that scenario in the BitLocker recovery-key guide from Meadowbank.
What to Try Before You Call It a Dead Reset
If the reset has failed with “No changes were made” and Windows is still booting, there is a short list of things worth trying before the laptop leaves the house. All of them are safe for a working install, and they often clear the underlying cause.
Finish any pending Windows update first. Open Settings, go to Windows Update, and let it fully apply any update that is sitting half-installed. A reset will not run while an update is pending, and this on its own is the most common reason the button refuses before it starts.
Run the two system-file checks in order from an elevated Command Prompt — DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth and then sfc /scannow. The SFC and DISM walk-through on the blog covers the exact sequence, which also happens to repair most of the hidden-partition faults that break the reset tooling. Reboot afterwards.
Check your free space. Reset This PC needs headroom on the system drive, roughly 10–15 GB for the “Keep my files” path and more for the “Remove everything” one. On a 128 GB laptop that has been running for two years, free space is often the quiet reason the reset dies partway. Empty the Downloads folder, run Storage Sense, uninstall anything you no longer use, and try again.
Temporarily disable any third-party security tool — the full-feature Norton, McAfee, ESET or similar packages that install a boot-time driver. Windows Defender on its own does not interfere. If the reset works after the third-party tool is removed, that is useful information for whichever one you reinstall afterwards.
When the Drive Is the Real Problem
A reset that fails after it has started wiping, or that loops endlessly in Automatic Repair, is the point at which the fault stops being a software one. The honest pattern on the bench is that around a third of these cases turn out to be the storage drive itself — usually an SSD that is approaching the end of its write life, occasionally an older mechanical drive with bad sectors spreading.
The tell on the bench is a drive that reports a growing count of reallocated or pending sectors in SMART data, or a controller that is throwing read errors on specific LBA ranges. Windows Reset is more sensitive to this than normal use because it is writing a full install image sequentially across the whole partition, and any bad block in that write path kills the reinstall. A laptop that limped along for months with slow boots because Windows was quietly reading around the bad blocks will fall over the moment you ask it to overwrite them.
If this is your situation, the fix is not another reset — it is a drive health check, almost always a drive replacement, and a clean install of Windows onto the new drive. Running the reset button a third time on a failing drive is the one move that reliably turns a recoverable laptop into one that needs data recovery on the old drive before any new Windows goes on. We cover the signs on the Edinburgh SSD failure guide, which is worth a read before you decide whether to reset again.
Why Backups Come Before Any Reset Attempt
“Keep my files” sounds reassuring, but in practice it keeps the folders under your user profile and nothing else. Files on the desktop, in Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music and Downloads are copied aside. Everything outside those folders is not — a project you saved to C:\Projects, a photo archive on the root of C:, a game save tucked away in a program folder, an Outlook .pst file in AppData. If the reset fails partway through “Keep my files”, the copy-aside step may not have completed, and the files you assumed were safe are now on a wiped partition.
The bench rule we would give any customer in Liberton or Craigmillar is simple. Before you touch Reset This PC, copy anything you cannot afford to lose onto an external drive or into a cloud account yourself, with your own hands. Treat the reset as a wipe, even on the “Keep my files” path, and you will never be the customer in the chair saying “I thought it was going to copy that” while we try to recover a drive that has already been partially overwritten.
The Clean-Install Call: When Reset Isn’t Worth Chasing
There is a point on every one of these jobs where the right call stops being “try the reset one more time” and starts being “install Windows fresh from a USB stick onto a known-good drive”. The signs we weigh at the counter are the age of the drive, the SMART report, whether the reset has failed with the drive already partially wiped, and whether the laptop has a Microsoft account tied to it that will carry licences and settings forward through a fresh install anyway. On most Liberton laptops that have reached this stage, a clean install is faster and more honest than another round of recovery tooling. The Loanhead guide to reinstalling Windows and the factory-reset walk-through both cover the sibling decisions.
What a clean install looks like on the bench is a Windows 11 USB made with the official Media Creation Tool, a known-good drive (either the existing one if SMART reports clean, or a new SSD if not), and a straightforward installer run with the right partitioning. Drivers come from the laptop maker’s support page, not from a driver pack website. Licences carry forward on the digital-licence tied to the hardware, so no key is normally needed. The whole job is a half-day on the bench once we have the drive decision made and the data copied off safely.
Liberton Drop-Off and Collection
Liberton is a ten-minute drive from the workshop at Parkhead Drive, with EH16 and EH17 postcodes running from Kirk Brae up through Mount Vernon Road and across to Gilmerton Road. We see Alnwickhill, Liberton Brae, Lasswade Road and the Inch regularly for drop-offs, with pickups across the EH17 end when a desktop is too awkward to carry. If the laptop has already been through a failed reset or two, bring the power adapter with it — a reset-looped laptop on a flat battery is a bench job that starts an hour late while it charges enough to boot. The Liberton same-day computer repair page covers the specifics for EH16 and EH17.
Related reading if the reset was triggered by a slower problem on the laptop in the first place is the software troubleshooting service page, which covers the diagnostic steps for a slow or misbehaving Windows that stop short of a reinstall. For the full install path when the drive turns out to be the problem, the OS installation page covers what the clean-install service looks like.
If none of this is landing and the laptop is already stuck in a reset loop, do not keep pressing “Try again” — book a slot or get in touch and we will walk through the drive-health question before anything else is written to the disk.
Last updated: 20 October 2026