Tanked my Windows install by holding down power button to shutdown ?

imtoooldforthis

imtoooldforthis

imtoooldforthis

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So I did a hard shutdown of my PC last night by holding down the power button rather than doing it the proper way from within windows (not the smartest thing I know) and this morning my PC won’t boot into Windows anymore.

The MSI logo appears briefly when powering on but then it loads to a black screen where only the mouse cursor is visible and stays on that screen forever.

I tried to get it to go into recovery mode by doing a hard restart three times in a row and the windows loading circle appeared briefly beneath the MSI logo as if it was going to load into recovery mode but again it just loaded back into the black screen with a mouse cursor visible.

So then I got my windows 11 USB drive and used that to boot into recovery mode, this worked and I went to the troubleshoot section and chose “start up repair” and then let it try and do its thing. Unfortunately it came back with a message saying “start up couldn’t repair your PC”.

So now I’m stuck.

I should mention this exact same problem occurred about six months ago when I had a power cut. I never found a solution (didn’t bother asking online though) and resorted to reinstalling windows.

I really don’t want to do that again. I don’t understand how a PC shutting down abruptly manages to tank an entire windows install every single time it occurs ?

I never used to have this on any of my older computers going back decades. It’s only on this new(ish) computer of mine where holding down power button to power off seems to tank a windows install 100% of the time.

Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this ? Perhaps some command prompt shenanigans or similar ?

It’s driving me insane and makes me constantly paranoid my windows install is going to die should there be a power cut etc
 
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You haven't tweaked any settings relating to your SSD?

E.g. the bottom option below:

X0dl0YPm.png
 
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Armageus said:
You haven't tweaked any settings relating to your SSD?

E.g. the bottom option below:

X0dl0YPm.png
Click to expand...
Thanks for the response but I’ve changed nothing at all.

One thing I’ve noticed that is odd is that whilst in recovery mode if I use CMD prompt to look at my hard drives the system drive is now listed as G: rather than C: (which is what it is in windows). My drive that was previously G: is now listed as C:

Is this just a quirk of how cmd prompt lists hard drives or could it point to a potential issue ?
 
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imtoooldforthis said:
Thanks for the response but I’ve changed nothing at all.

One thing I’ve noticed that is odd is that whilst in recovery mode if I use CMD prompt to look at my hard drives the system drive is now listed as G: rather than C: (which is what it is in windows). My drive that was previously G: is now listed as C:

Is this just a quirk of cmd prompt listing hard drive or could it point to a potential issue ?
Click to expand...

Recovery mode will quite often reassign drives as it sees fit to get into a recoverable state. It just means it's running from whatever it has assigned C: (Which may not necessarily be your original G: drive)

Your best bet is using a fresh ISO for recovery media to see if you can fix it with that.

Also maybe try looking at doing "bootrec" (Tons of info online about steps).
 
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I followed some tutorial on YouTube which now lets me select “start up settings” from recovery mode trouble shooting menu and this allows me to start in safe mode and sure enough the PC boots just fine.

However if I then restart the same problem occurs.

Now I can login to safe mode what should my next steps be to try and fix this ?
 
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Ok i uninstalled my Nvidia display driver whilst in safe mode and now it works again.

Seems it was booting into windows fine, the problem must have been related to graphics cards drivers somehow getting messed up when a hard shut down is done.

Weird !
 
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