Starting frustrated. Last night I finally downloaded all of the files to install this, including the patches.The first install seemed to go fine. ithen clicked the 1.02 patch which was the required launch day install file. i got the hourglass uponDoubleClick. icouldn't ctrlaltdel out or do anything. So i pressed the power button. Pc shutdown and i restarted.

"Starting Windows" is all my pc does now. I let it stay on that screen for over an hour. Ive tried repair windows and it won't go past that splash screen. I've tried safe mode which also hangs.
So utterly annoying. Not only can't i play this game, i can't play any and nothing short of a total rebuild is my option
All i have is this phone to try to find solutions on the web.

you probably just didn't wiat long enough, often times the files from gog are so compressed that it can take a bit to unzip them.
And the game did not "break" your windows, you probably did that by doing the "hard reset".

I watched the whole 2nd half of the nba playoff game last night while waiting, practically 2 hours before i hard reset. How long was i to continue waiting? And the only thing i did last night on my pc was finish the last couple downloads for this, run the setup, and the patch before it crashed. I was also on gog.com at the time. I fail to see what i did that led to this.
I can't even send in a proper support ticket now because i can't access my dxdiag file.

I doubt this has anything to do with GOG or Witcher 3, if you can't even access Windows repair, which is loaded before the operating system, not to mention safe mode. Hopefully a fresh install will fix your problem and it's not caused by faulty hardware.

Perhaps your motherboard or hard disk is broken. Test it with a cd boot or other hard disk. Good luck.

The only possible connection I can imagine are the Microsoft redistributables that get installed with Witcher 3.
(you find both even after installation in a folder named __redist).

But if this is the reason, it's not something CDPR or GOG can do something about - these are Microsoft packages.

Yes, this was my thought too. As soon as they popped up during the installation, i got nervous since i had never seen them before on any gog game installation and i dont like 3rd party apps messing with windows system files. When my pc doesnt boot into safe mode, when it hangs after choosing the LKGC option, and every tried and true troubleshooting tactic fails because the pc can't even get past someting on startup tells me its a software issue and the only change on my pc was the files installed by Witcher 3.

From a general standpoint it's *highly* unlikely that Witcher's install directly affected your windows unless you capped your HDD's space in the process.

Yah i thought about that too. I had around 200gb of free space when i started the install and when it was over halfway done, I peeked again I want to say i saw 176gb free. I cant say that was the exact amount i saw but whatever it was gave me assurance that i wasn't going to run out of space.

At this point after nearly a day i know there isn't a fix because something in windows went wonky. I know something with the witcher 3 installation caused it and i know there will be people that won't buy that. There was absolutely nothing else going on with my pc at the time.
Ive run pc diagnostics and all my hardware comes back clean.
I've checked the bios, i can hit F8 to get to the troubleshooting option and each of them launch but from that point, they all hang and won't go any further. There are no beeps for any hardware error codes. No blue screens. And it sucks that this is the result.
before i wipe the hd and start new, waiting for a friend to come over tomorrow to see if i can boot off his thumb drive and run chkdsk on my hd. I can't even get to a cmd prompt lol.

Thanks for anyone who read thru this and tried offering help

I wouldn't worry about C++ redistributables. They are not system files as you are thinking of them. They are basically code libraries that developers use during development, and to make sure all the libraries are available to the game, they include the redistributable. Most modern games do this. If you use Steam, you might remember seeing them install in a popup the first time you launch a game. It isn't unusual to have several versions of redistributables, even for the same year, if you check add/remove programs (don't remove them).

You can just use an OS like Ubuntu (I think it even has a portable version). You can probably try running some fixes from there, but I doubt you'll be able to fix windows. Most of the time when windows breaks you're better off just reinstalling it, specially if it breaks during booting.

You can try making a bootable windows usb and try to recover it from there if you haven't done that yet. (i assume you didn't try repairing windows with this)

For the MSVC redistributables, I mostly agree - but the DirectX redist's are patching the system.
They *should* not overwrite newer versions of DirectX or break the system, and I have never heard of them doing this- but well, you know: Microsoft Updates.

At this point after nearly a day i know there isn't a fix because something in windows went wonky. I know something with the witcher 3 installation caused it and i know there will be people that won't buy that. There was absolutely nothing else going on with my pc at the time.

By definition of the word you don't know what caused it.
your harddrive MIGHT have been doing something, even though the pc was frozen or you thought it to be.
doing the hard reset mights have broken some files on your harddrive, or even broke some hardware components.
It is very unlikely that this happened, but it is just as unlikely that trying to install the witcher 3 destroyed your windows.

I hope you can sort this out, i can only imagine how much this sucks for you.