wont boot past BIOS

davegt3

davegt3

davegt3

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Joined
30 Dec 2010
Posts
173
Good evening all

hoping someone may be able to advise, my computer has been running faultlessly for the past couple of years. now all of a sudden it wont boot past the bios, nothing has changed in terms of hardware or software.

I've checked all the basics that i can think of
- connections to the mb
- removed ram and tried in different slots, tried only 1 stick out of the 2 etc
- disconnected all external devices
- disconnected all hard drives and tried 1 at a time
- tried doing a windows repair
- removed graphics card and tried booting with MB graphics

none of the above has made any difference, my initial thoughts are a potential failed boot hard drive?

any help would be greatly received

specs are the following

i7 10700k
MSI mpg z490
16gb ram corsair vengeance ddr4 ( 2 x 8gb)

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Any codes or beeps provided by your board? You might be able to get a speaker for the board dirt cheap if no one else suggests other options.

Got a spare drive to replace boot drive?
 
The_Arbiter said:
Any codes or beeps provided by your board? You might be able to get a speaker for the board dirt cheap if no one else suggests other options.

Got a spare drive to replace boot drive?
Click to expand...
i haven't got a speaker but if needed ill order one, ive just ordered a replacement hard drive to try a reinstall tomorrow.
 
Is it just stopping at the bios or giving any message on screen re drive?

As jackabamba says is the drive showing in the bios at all?

Re the speaker it's worth ordering one if you've not got one spare or that you can nick off another PC, I hate the fact that most manufacturers of cases seem to have removed them, and most motherboard manufacturers have removed any beeper from their boards as it saves pennies (I got a bunch of beepers for a few pounds delivered*) but cripples any attempt to troubleshoot issues.

It sounds like you're going through the steps logically, and at this point it's likely to be either motherboard, CPU or PSU at a guess.

Have you tried unplugging it from the mains and clearing the cmos? (assuming you've got no custom settings you can't remember) in case that helps.


*I've ended up fitting them into various machines I've been fixing as a standard.
 
When you say " tried doing a windows repair"? What happened there? Is there a blue screen with choices after bios?

Were you able to boot from a usb windows install media?

If you can't boot from a windows usb it's unlikely it's a ssd/hdd issue.
 
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davegt3 said:
I can get to the blue windows repair screen when booting from usb. But when i try and ren the repair it say its unavailable
Click to expand...
maybe its a boot partition issue on your windows ssd? Can you run the windows installer and see your system drives are available for installing windows? If so you could be ok.

Efi/MBR errors are difficult to fix with the terminal but a new install usually sorts it.

Just an idea though, it might not be your issue.

just to add: If you can see the hard drive in the windows installer eg "where do you want to install Windows?" Box and you got like "drive 0, partition *" and so on. If you get and error like "windows cannot be installed here" or something like that. You can delete the volume and format using the options usually sorts it. Bare in mind that you lose all the data. If you don't delete and or format, you get to keep everything in windows.old. All your steam games can moved across quite easily.
 
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Couple of things…

1. Have you tried resetting the bios?
2. Does the bios retain the settings when you turn it on each time? If not, you could try a bios battery swap
 
davegt3 said:
I can get to the blue windows repair screen when booting from usb. But when i try and ren the repair it say its unavailable
Click to expand...
Sounds like an issue with either the windows install being corrupted to the extent it can't be repaired or a disk issue.

I'd do a clean install of windows onto another drive. The fact you can boot from USB suggests to me there's little mileage in messing about with hardware other than the disk drives,
 
If you have access to another PC, I would plug your primary drive into that WITHOUT changing the primary drive in the BIOS. Then do a chkdisk on it in Windows. That way you rule out SSD/HDD. If it is a SATA, you just need the SATA cable and a molex power plug. If it is M2 NVME, you would need to use a second slot.

If that proves fine, I would try another PSU or use a PSU tester on the first PC. These are not too expensive (probably <£20).
 
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