Bad day at the home office - PC won't boot...

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bendud

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#306150 1-Jul-2023 13:39

Thanks to some excellent advice on here, we have a new PC! With the full approval of the CFO as the case is very attractive... https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/north/north/chalk-white/ on such details do such decisions balance!

This was a long overdue upgrade (old Dell Optiplex 9010 with a 1Gb 1050i card) and the new one is a beauty - at least until today. Now it's a heavy paperweight as I seem to have broken it :-(

Aorus X570S Pro AX with Ryzen 5 5600 and a Radeon R7600 Speedster 8Gb, windows 11 Home.

Was fine last week. Sparks were here on Wednesday and probably got a hard power off, not sure if that is relevant though. Certainly had some odd Bluetooth behaviour since. Reinstalling drivers didn't fix.

Seemed to be a conflict between Windows Update and the AMD video drivers - according to AMD error messages anyway. Normal office stuff fine but whenever the lad wanted to run FIFA would crash after about 5-10 minutes.

Found the gpedit fix for disabling the W11 Update pulling in drivers to overwrite the AMD ones.

Disabled automatic driver updates and reinstalled AMD drivers from their website.

Then a bunch of error messages on restart, and ever since there has been no way I can find to boot windows.

I suspect there's a boot drive problem. If I run a command prompt it says X:/ rather than C:/

The BIOS settings should load with pressing ESC but it seems to be in a W11 "automatic repair loop" and so when the POST occurs there's no "press ESC" appearing and it says "Diagnosing PC" instead. USB keyboard, tried Del and Backspace too.

Won't reinstall from Windows startup or over Ethernet / cloud reinstall (presumably as no boot drive to repair)

Have tried holding power to reset the loop behaviour but still happening.

I am of course a simple soul who usually uses Macs and hasn't had to troubleshoot a PC for some years, so please be gentle but any ideas how to at least get in the BIOS to set the boot drive? I haven't had issues with accessing the BIOS before using ESC but back then it gave it as an option...

Thanks in advance

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bendud

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#3098158 1-Jul-2023 13:52

For clarity, when I boot the machine instead of being able to hit ESC to access the BIOS, the splash screen says "Preparing PC repair" and as yet I can't work out a combination of power etc that stops this always happening.

cheers

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gzt

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#3098159 1-Jul-2023 13:52

Windows 11 recovery diagnostic boot might be interesting.

bendud

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#3098161 1-Jul-2023 14:07

Windows-R? Doesn't do anything differently - same loop. Any other way of accessing it?

Pondering CLR CMOS but seems a bit worrying, poking the board with a screwdriver!

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gzt

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#3098164 1-Jul-2023 14:19

Oh, bad. You'll need to create a windows 11 USB recovery thingy using a different machine.

bendud

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#3098165 1-Jul-2023 14:21

I'm guessing here that I can't make a W11 recovery USB on a W10 machine then...?

Inevitably the only other machines I have access too (apart from a W11 ARM install on a Mac) are W10...

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gzt

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#3098166 1-Jul-2023 14:28

Probably ok for some diagnostics.

mrdrifter

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#3098212 1-Jul-2023 14:31

If you create a Windows 11 install USB (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installation-media-for-windows-99a58364-8c02-206f-aa6f-40c3b507420d) and you can boot to it, it should let you select the option for repair when you get to the screen with the 'Install' option, if I recall it has a repair option near the bottom of the screen.

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bendud

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#3098381 1-Jul-2023 16:32

Ok have managed to reinstall windows 11. And this time I’m not installing anything weird :-)
Thanks everyone
B

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bendud

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#3098488 1-Jul-2023 22:24

If I want to keep the W11 equivalent of Time Machine backups on a spare 3Tb drive that I can put in (ex-NAS) should I use Windows own backup stuff or a third party bit of software?

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fe31nz

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#3098502 2-Jul-2023 00:45

Whenever a PC gets a power off or crash (eg BSOD) without a proper shut down, it is very important to do full filesystem checks before rebooting into your normal operating system. If you fail to do this and simply start using your system as normal, you run the risk of getting serious filesystem corruption, which is what appears to have happened to the OP. And in the worst case, you can have to reinstall and will have lost all the data on the affected partitions. Windows is supposed to do a chkdsk /f automatically on boot for any partition is marked as "dirty" (failed to be shut down properly). But it does not always do that, even when you have made sure the option to do it automatically turned on (it defaults to on). So you really should be doing it manually when ever a system did not shut down properly. Every time. Always.

You can do chkdsk /f manually by having an alternative boot partition where you have a minimal Windows install. Or you can boot into recovery mode and go to the command prompt option there. Or you can boot from a Windows install DVD or USB stick then go through the menus to get to a command prompt. You should do "chkdsk /f /x <drive letter>:" for each drive. If you have drives which do not have a drive letter (eg mounted via a junction), you need to use a tool like the mountvol command to find the volume GUID string and use that instead of "<drive letter>:". These look like:

\\?\Volume{9975187d-aba4-4895-b3a7-1de87c9625ae}\

For Linux the same applies - do "fsck -C -f" on all partitions. Boot from an alternative partition or live boot image, as it is not possible to do fsck -f on the boot partition, even when using Grub to boot into repair mode.

For both Windows and Linux, if the chkdsk/fsck command reported any errors being fixed, you always need to run the command repeatedly until it reports no errors.

Yes, I am aware that it is very tedious to do this, but the risk of filesystem corruption is too great if you do not do it every time.

bendud

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#3098735 2-Jul-2023 18:21

Thanks - that sounds tedious but wise. I'm hoping chances of interruptions will drop steeply when the renos are all done. In the meantime I will try and do the above if it happens again.

Thinking about backup duties, I have a NAS running that has some space on it for backups from a PC (currently used mostly for Time Machine, plus music and photos). Any recommendations for an easy to use Synology backup app for the W11 machine please? Suitable for use by a simpleton. Ta

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