Fix VM Bootloop/Startup loop (Flashing Restarting and Stopping)

Watch the video:

If you’re trying to start a Virtual Machine in Hyper-V, and it’s flashing rapidly between “Starting” and “Stopping”: it’s stuck in a boot loop. You can’t close it normally. Right-clicking and choosing Stop, Stopping the Hyper-V service, and even restarting accomplishes nothing.

I was stuck with this:

Here’s what you need if you want to stop the VM or are just looking for a command.

1. Open Terminal and head to Powershell (Windows 11) or PowerShell (Windows 10/11)
2. Run the following command, making sure to swap out win11 with the name of the problematic virtual machine:

1	Stop-Process ((Get-WmiObject Win32_Process | ? {$_.Name -match 'VMWP' -and $_.CommandLine -match (Get-VM "win11").ID}).ProcessId) -Force

And that’s the easy part out of the way.

There are infinite reasons your virtual machine has just stopped functioning. Anywhere from corrupt virtual hard disks to Windows Update breaking things. I haven’t figured out what was wrong with mine, but the most straightforward option was going nuclear. It was about time to refresh my virtual machine installation. Incredibly annoying, but this is just how it is with Windows. My channel started because I had so many issues with Windows.

Hopefully, you can piece together what has changed since the last successful launch. For me, it’s been months.