When you want to reset your Windows 10 computer to factory settings, you can use the inbuilt feature Reset My PC. You don’t have to depend on the factory recovery partition to reset the PC, with this feature. However, sometimes, you might meet with an unfortunate instance where the reset process fails. You would get an error message – ‘There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made’.
What causes Windows 10 resetting issues?
To know more about why the reset failed, open an elevated Command Prompt, and run dir c:\ /a:sh (without quotes). You can see a $SysReset folder on the root directory of C: drive. Now open the file C:\$SysReset\Logs\Setupact.log in order to read the log of Reset My PC to know what the problem is. And depending on the issue you are facing, you can select a required solution.
Here are a few solutions to the problem. Try them out.
- Windows recovery environment
Usually, Windows 10 reset problem occurs due to the Windows Recovery Environment image that is corrupted or offline. What you can do is to open an elevated command prompt, and run these commands to see if it can resolve the issue:
reagentc /disable
<reboot>
reagentc enable
This would fix the issue automatically. If not, then you can copy the Winre.wim file from some other working computer to replace the original one. If you are unable to access the file, then copy the entire Recovery folder.
2. Run Startup repair
If method 1 didn’t work out, then try this method where you need to run Startup Repair from the Recovery Environment.
- In order to access recovery environment, you can click on Restart while pressing and holding the Shift key. You can enter the recovery mode by also booting from Windows 10 recovery USB drive.
- Once booted into Windows 10 recovery mode, click on Advanced options when recovery screen appears
- Now click on Troubleshoot – Advanced options – then click on Startup Repair
3. Command prompt
In this method, run the following commands in an elevated Command Prompt.
cd %windir%\system32\config
ren system system.001
ren software software.001
After running the commands, close the Command Prompt, reboot the system. Now you should be able to reset Windows 10 without any error.
4. Clean Install
If the above method also doesn’t work, then you can download the same version of Windows 10 ISO file, and perform a clean install. If you have Windows 10 activated, then you can reinstall the same version of Windows, you need not activate it again.
5. Restore to the previous version
Other than the clean install and Windows 10 reset, you can also restore your system to the previous version from a backup. When Windows is installed and the settings are configured, you have to create a Windows 10 recovery image backup. So when there are problems with reset, you can restore to the previous version from the backups.
Note: In case you have lost data after factory reset on Windows 10, then you can make use of this Windows Data Recovery tool. It will efficiently retrieve data after factory reset on Windows. Even after format / reformat, repartition of the hard drive, and other data loss scenarios, you can use this software to get back all your data.
