Riddle me this!

[Jono8]

So after working pretty much flawlessly since building it over a year and a half ago my rig did a very funny thing today.

Turned it on, loading screen with Gigabyte logo comes up as normal, then just goes to a black screen with a flashing cursor thing (like a single flashing underline thing like it is about to show command lines etc), then after a few second of that...nothing, just a black screen forever, however long you waited. No beeps, no error messages, just stuck. Fans all on, lights all on , everything seems normal except I just get a nothing and it won't boot into anything.

So I restarted it, and then realised I could not get into the bios (!?). However after a few other restarts trying various different things I realised if I pressed F12 to bring up the boot list, that worked, which looked promising as from there you can go to "enter setup" to get in to the bios. I did that (pressed enter setup), but then nothing again...

So I did the usual, unplugged all usb peripherals, tried with one ram stick, still nothing. Just had done the same thing repeatedly about 15-20 times.

Then I unplugged all disks/drives and it finally prompted me that booting had failed and asked if I wanted to load optimized defaults/go into bios. So I went into the bios, did not change a thing (did not load optimised defaults and kept all my original settings), saved and exited, turned off, plugged everything back in, turned on and it booted into windows and now it is working fine again like nothing ever happened. I have turned it off and on again a few times and it seems fine with booting normally again.

WTF?

Can anyone explain what might have happened? It is like the boot process/manager just got stuck and the only thing that unstuck it was disconnecting all the sata drives and plugging them back in again but I can't think of how that is possible.

 

[TWiNKLeT0Es]

Its possible that S.M.A.R.T was triggered i would check all drives.

 

[Jono8]

Its possible that S.M.A.R.T was triggered i would check all drives.

Thanks. They are all SSD's and i checked them all fairly recently with SSD monitoring tools (intel toolbox/samsung magician etc) and they all said they were in good condition but i will do it again when i get home from work and run some checkdsk scans etc.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I'd say more of a windows issue

 

[VKleita]

THAT sounds like a confused Mainboard issue.

When seeing this in the past my fix was to pull the power, pull the cmos battery for ten mins, reassemble.

I think your way basically just forced the Bios to kick back in sort of thing.

Anyway, lets hope it was just a one off eh

 

[Jono8]

THAT sounds like a confused Mainboard issue.

When seeing this in the past my fix was to pull the power, pull the cmos battery for ten mins, reassemble.

I think your way basically just forced the Bios to kick back in sort of thing.

Anyway, lets hope it was just a one off eh

Yes i hope it was that. It just seemed to be terminally stuck in trying to boot from something but just gave me a black screen everytime until i booted it with no sata devices connected.

 

[varkanoid]

Corrupt BIOS more like and when it asked for defaults thats when the backup bios was copied over to the primary. Turn off the Gigabyte Logo screen so you can actually see the POST info to tell you what its doing when it boots (who has that on
nowadays !).

 

[Jono8]

OK, so this happened again today after working fine for a week (gaming, music creation(Daw stuff) etc) : /

Once again, I switched off, unplugged all sata drives, then turned it back on and it says boot failure. I then went into the bios, changed nothing , turned it off, plugged them back in and then it boots up fine.

What the hell is going on ?

Interestingly at first I tried just unplugging the boot drive but that still didn't prompt the "boot failure" message. Both times this has happened, the only way to fix it is to unplug all drives and the reconnect them.

Have run disk check on all my drives and no problems found. I also ran the intel full diagnostic on the boot drive and it says it is in perfect health with no issues after checking every sector.

Does anyone have a clue? Help!

 

[Danny75]

Just curious - does Disk Management correctly show the boot drive as "Healthy, Primary Partition, System, Active, Boot, Page File, Crash Dump" and all the other drives as only "Healthy, Primary Partition"?

Maybe this might help - https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-rebuild-the-bcd-in-windows-2624508

 

[Jono8]

Just curious - does Disk Management correctly show the boot drive as "Healthy, Primary Partition, System, Active, Boot, Page File, Crash Dump" and all the other drives as only "Healthy, Primary Partition"?

Maybe this might help - https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-rebuild-the-bcd-in-windows-2624508

Thanks.

This is how my disk management looks -



So disk H appears to have a "system reserved partition" which is a bit odd although this maybe because I had windows installed on that one ages ago ( I had formatted it but obviously didn't re partition it properly).

Would this cause an issue? Also, if it was something like this, why would it be so intermittent?

 

[Danny75]

Thanks.

This is how my disk management looks -



So disk H appears to have a "system reserved partition" which is a bit odd although this maybe because I had windows installed on that one ages ago ( I had formatted it but obviously didn't re partition it properly).

Would this cause an issue? Also, if it was something like this, why would it be so intermittent?

That's interesting, Jono. From my (limited) understanding, only the boot drive should be marked "Active", in your case the C: drive. Instead it's the H: drive that's marked "Active" and has the System Reserved partition which you pointed out.

Now I don't quite know how it works with Dual Booting (never tried it). But still I'd imagine your C: drive should also(?) be marked "Active"?

I encountered a similar type of Boot issue once, when I re-installed Windows and forgot to take the other drives Offline first. I ended up with something like what your Disk Management shows, i.e. a different drive marked "Active" instead of the C: drive. It was also intermittent. Why, I don't know.

I looked for solutions and came across a good guide which involved using DiskPart (I think) to fix that. Not sure whether I'd be able to find that guide again but the link I posted may work just as well.

Due to my limited knowledge I'd get second opinions on this from those who know more about it. Maybe post in the Storage section and show the Disk Management screenshot.

 

[Danny75]

I think I found the guide I used to mark the C: drive as Active and make the F: drive INactive. In any case, the instructions are exactly what I did to mark my C: drive Active and solve the intermittent booting issue.

Set Active Partition via Command Line

If you screwed something up in Windows and marked the wrong partition as active, you will no longer be able to boot your computer. In the case where you cannot mark a partition as active using Windows, you’ll have to use the command line.

Depending on your version of Windows, getting to the command line can be a bit tricky. Read my post on restarting Windows in safe mode to get to the system repair options for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10. If you’re running Windows 8, read my post on booting to system recovery options. Once there, you have to go to Troubleshoot, then Advanced Options, and then click on Command Prompt.



First get into the command prompt using a boot up disk and type diskpart at the prompt.



At the DiskPart prompt, type in list disk. You will see the list of disk currently attached to your computer. Now type in select disk n, where n is the disk number. In my example, I would type select disk 0.



Now that we have selected the correct disk, type in list partition to get a list of all the partitions on that disk. To select the partition we want to set as active, type in select partition n, where n is the partition number.



Now that we have selected the disk and partition, we can mark it as active by just typing the word active and pressing Enter. That’s it! Now the partition is set.

Most people are familiar with using FDISK to mark a partition as active, but that is now an older and outdated command. You should use DISKPART to manage disk and partitions on a modern Windows computer.

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/set-active-partition-vista-xp/

 

[Jono8]

I think I found the guide I used to mark the C: drive as Active and make the F: drive INactive. In any case, the instructions are exactly what I did to mark my C: drive Active and solve the intermittent booting issue.

Thanks for that. However what partition on my C drive would I mark as active? There is a recovery partition, and EFI system partition and then the main one. There isnat "system reserved one" like on the H drive (the currently active one)

 

[Danny75]

Thanks for that. However what partition on my C drive would I mark as active? There is a recovery partition, and EFI system partition and then the main one. There isnat "system reserved one" like on the H drive (the currently active one)

Hmm good question. In case it's of any help, this is how my Disk Management looks, with the boot drive Disk 0 ( C: ) being a Samsung 840 Evo 120GB SSD, and the others storage/games/back-up drives.



So maybe the 100MB EFI System Partition on your Disk 0 is the one that should be marked Active? Or maybe that EFI System Partition should be left alone and a new System Reserved partition should be created.

Ignore the missing Page File on mine. I'm currently rolling without one to see if that works fine at this point in time.

 

[Jono8]

OK, so it boots fine without disk H connected so that obviously doesn't affect the boot.

So I am going to back up what is on disk H, reformat it so it is just one partition (because there is 13gb unallocated for some reason!?) so then I should just have the EFI system partition as the boot one.

However, more interestingly I just plugged my external back up usb drive in to back up the stuff on my H drive and that shows as active as well!?

 

[Danny75]

However, more interestingly I just plugged my external back up usb drive in to back up the stuff on my H drive and that shows as active as well!?

Maybe due to previous backups copying the boot flag/BCD thing (apparently on your H: drive as well as your C: drive, although C: doesn't show it) that determines whether a drive is marked as "Active" onto your external?

 

[Jono8]

OK, this is driving me mental now as it is doing it more frequently. I just get a blinking line/cursor thing until I turn off and unplug all drives ( it has to be all drives, not just the boot drive). Then I turn it on and get a boot failure detected warning, then I enter bios, save and exit, turn off, plug my drives back in, turn it on and all works fine.

I just don't get it : /

I ONLY get the boot failure detected warning upon starting it with no drives connected. If I leave it connected, it will continue to show the flashing cursor then go to a black screen.

 

[Jono8]

One thought - could a dodgy sata cable be doing this?

 

[mistersprinkles]

One thought - could a dodgy sata cable be doing this?

Entirely possible

 

[Jono8]

Think I may have found the culprit. I re-jigged some cables and where some drives were plugged in and it has been working perfectly again recently so I thought all was good. Today though I wanted to get into the bios and found that one particular drive stops it getting into the bios. The drive works fine and I can't find any errors on it but it appears that if that drive is plugged in, the bios just shows a black screen.

Why on earth would that be?