PC Troubleshooting Help please

Chris C

Chris C

Chris C

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Joined
30 Sep 2004
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Wiltshire
Context - Colleague at work said her 'gaming pc' was broken and she had paid people to look at it and it had worked for a bit but was now broken again. I said I would take a look to help her out and then she doesn't have to pay some hack in a local PC shop.

AM3+ Mobo, FX-4300 CPU, 8GB Ram, 960 GPU, 1TB HDD. It's a cyberpower pre-built jobbie.

Problem : Push power button, everything spins up, POST is fine, shows the HDD and the DVD drive. Then it doesn't boot into windows.

So I downloaded the windows 10 installation media onto USB, it shows that up as bootable and I installed it, it gets to the first reboot required and then says there are no other bootable drives other than the USB. So I thought the HDD might be duff. Swapped it for a small spare SSD I had and same issue. So I changed the SATA cable, the power cable and tried it in each of the onboard SATA ports. Same problem.

Could the controller on the mobo be broken? just seemed odd to me that it shows up in POST but then is never found as a bootable drive. I changed windows installation media to a DVD and same issue (not that I thought it would do anything).

I was going to try and pick up a cheap AM3+ mobo and try swapping that out, but what do you guys think? She can't afford a new PC :/

Thanks for any help!
 
Have you tried removing the USB right after the first reboot? So it forces to check for the OS on the pc drive? or even running an OS installed in the USB itself to make sure the rest of the pc has nothing to do with it.
 
Yes I removed the USB stick and it said no bootable drives found, haven't tried installing an OS on the stick its self so I will do that.
I did clear the CMOS and the BIOS is the latest version :(

Thanks!
 
Have you tried a different PSU? I'm thinking that while you've tried a different HDD power cable, it may yet be running off a faulty source.
 
Chris C said:
Yes I removed the USB stick and it said no bootable drives found, haven't tried installing an OS on the stick its self so I will do that.
I did clear the CMOS and the BIOS is the latest version :(

Thanks!
Click to expand...

also mess arround with the boot options in the BIOS (change booting orders and all that, even if it does not make sense), i have had this problem before with my pc and the problem was that it was looking for the OS on my ssd, but instead it had to load from the boot manager, which was last in the boot order, since windows was still being installed,
 
I did play around with the boot order, that didn't seem to have any effect but thanks! Just trying to check I hadn't missed anything obvious before I swap out the mobo.
Haven't tried a different PSU, I think I have one knocking about so I'll try that too. cheers.
 
I know you said you have played around with the boot order in the BIOS, but as Kama says, this really does sound like that sort of problem - of which I too have suffered.

Try disabling (in the BIOS) all drives except the one with the OS on and try again - I bet that resolves the issue - you then have the trouble of reenabling them in the correct order they should be in :D

For some odd reason, one of my PC's periodically looses it's boot order and I have to manually adjust it again which solves the issue - nothing more - it does this for no apparent reason and very occationally - it is an old i920 x58 system with multiple HDD's installed - otherwise perfectly stable.
 
Thanks guys, I will have time to have another play tonight. Will update if anything positive comes of it!
 
Success! Instead of removing things from the boot order I actually disabled it like you suggested and it worked! I never would have thought of that. Thanks for the help guys.
 
Chris C said:
Success! Instead of removing things from the boot order I actually disabled it like you suggested and it worked! I never would have thought of that. Thanks for the help guys.
Click to expand...

Great to hear it's fixed - thanks for reporting back and confirming - others may find this a useful tip too :)
 
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