Sudden PC Problems (Won't finish booting)

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Crux
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Sudden PC Problems (Won't finish booting)

Post by Crux »

Cross-posted at GT:

Hey folks,

Hoping someone here can help me out. I've had an extremely shitty 48 hours, and fixing this would go a long way to improving my mood. My home pc is set up with an SSD as my primary drive, a large regular had drive for storage, and two more ssds for game installations. I leave to drop my son off at school yesterday morning, come back and my monitors are both blank, with the classic blinking light to show they aren't getting input from the pc. Odd, I thought... so I rebooted my PC. Or tried to.

Bios shows up, then it acts like it's about to go onto the next stage but instead... nothing. PC is on, monitors stop showing input from the pc. I reboot, go into the bios and check a few things. Drives are all still registering, temperatures all seem fine. So I reboot. This time I get a windows symbol past bios, and it tells me windows didn't shut down properly. I tried to do a startup repair, but that failed. What the heck, I rebooted. Now I'm back to square one. I go back to bios again, reboot again and get windows again. This time I elect to reinstall Windows 10. Set that to going, once it reaches about 8% I leave the room for a little while. I come back, screen is a dark grey/black. I have a mouse cursor I can move around, nothing else. Patience is a virtue so I leave it alone for an hour, come back and nothing has changed. Reboot time.

Now when I reboot, I get the windows symbol after the bios, but then it seems to just be frozen. No more options to repair, etc etc. A short while ago I threw in my old WIndows 7 DVD, and I'm installing Windows 7 from that. So far so good, I'm 75% into expanding windows files. EDIT: Windows 7 fully installed, although for some reason network adapter is not being detected/detecting my network. It was installed on the same SSD that was my drive for Windows 10.
DOUBLE EDIT: Plot thickens. On rebooting the new windows 7 installation, it tells me that it needs to check one of the disks for consistency (one of my gaming ssds). It then freezes and nothing actually happens.

Power supply is fine obviously. If it were ram I would think I'd be getting blue screens, or making it into windows at least some of the time. CPU seems to be working fine. Graphics card is there or I wouldn't have anything on the screen. The only thing I can think of is my ssd is failing or failed in some fashion. I've had no experience with that though so was hoping someone here might have an idea. I'd really like to get this up and running again ASAP for both work and personal reasons. THanks in advance for any help.
If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit - Mitch Hedberg
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gilraen
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Re: Sudden PC Problems (Won't finish booting)

Post by gilraen »

It's possible that MBR (master boot record) for your Windows installation became corrupted - could be software-related or could be that just the wrong sector on the SSD decided to fail. If that was the case - the new Windows 7 installation obviously wrote its booting information to a good sector; no idea why Win 10 installation bombed, though.

When your disk check freezes - does it count down and freeze before it does any checking or does it actually start the check? Have you tried booting into safe mode?
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Crux
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Re: Sudden PC Problems (Won't finish booting)

Post by Crux »

It starts to count down. It gives me the option to hit any key to skip the disk check but that doesn't seem to help.. last time I pressed it it froze immediately.
If you are flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit - Mitch Hedberg
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Anonymous Bosch
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Re: Sudden PC Problems (Won't finish booting)

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

If you have access to another system you can use, I'd suggest using a free bootable rescue toolkit -- such as MediCat DVD -- to ease the diagnostic/troubleshooting process.

MediCat DVD includes SSD Life, which is specifically designed to analyze SSD reliability.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P. J. O'Rourke
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