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Problem description: If I power on my desktop PC (Win 10), it only gets partway through and hangs like that forever. It gets past the part where lights on the mouse, keyboard and other plugged-in stuff come on, the various hard drives power up, etc. Then it brings up the motherboard's "Republic of Gaming" logo. That's where the trouble starts. There's no spinny "loading" dots for a quite a long time, then the whole screen redraws, this time with the loading ring, and that's as far as it gets. The dots don't freeze, they spin, but they spin forever. Or, at least, they spun for ~45 minutes last night before I finally gave in. (During this stage, if this is a clue, the light on my mouse has gone out again and keyboard is unresponsive, ie hitting caps lock doesn't switch on its caps lock light.) There are variations on this. Sometimes it'll send me to the blue options screen Windows has for when boot fails. I can also get to the BIOS screen, if that tells us anything. So, I want to replace a part or whatever, but how do we solve the puzzle of what's causing the problem? Attempted fixes: 1) In that blue troubleshooting options page that you get when a computer fails to boot a few times, I've tried the Boot Repair function, but it just goes through a diagnosis stage and then reports back with "failed to repair". I've done this a few times out of desperation. I also used it to open a command prompt and run chkdsk (without the /f and /r) just to find out whether my C drive still exists, or if this is happening because it's died. But no, it responds very well, no errors, no bad sectors. 2) Someone on Discord suggested I try the repair function from a Windows install USB, so I did that, but no change, it failed to repair. 3) The next idea was a Linux USB. If I can boot into Ubuntu, it'd give us some clues about whether we're looking at software or hardware failure etc. So I made the stick this morning. Now, at this point I'd had a whole evening and a whole morning of the above happening consistently. But we've come to a twist. I put in the Ubuntu USB and waited for it to boot. This was taking a very long time, and it looked like it wasn't going to work. But I left it for a little bit longer just in case. Five, six minutes. And then... It gave me the Windows login screen. And let me log in. And now it's just working again. I do not feel any better about this than I did when it was broken. I know it booted by pure chance, and I may only have this one opportunity to do things with it while it's working, including anything that might fix or help to identify the problem. I haven't reset or shut down the PC since, and it honestly seems to just be working, all my hard drives seem fine, I've run a couple of games without any problem, worked on some art and some audio editing, it is behaving normally. When it first booted into windows though, there were signs of a problem. That login screen took a long time to display its picture, for instance, and icons took a while to draw, including the little icons in the list of hard drives and other assorted gubbins in the explorer navigation panel. But after the first couple of minutes of being booted, it's been acting normally. I now realise that the reason it didn't boot into Ubuntu was because I'd put the USB stick in the slot next to the one I'd specified when I edited the boot order for the Windows USB stick last night, and it was never going to boot from this at all. That's pretty flipping lucky in retrospect as I might never have got into Windows. My current idea: I'm wondering maybe this is a struggling boot disk after all. It's an old-as-the-hills 64gb SSD, from 2010 if you can believe that. So it's due. And those icons struggling to load feels C-drivey. So I'm thinking I clone that onto a newer and bigger SSD (which I already have right here, plugged in) and try to boot from that. The only thing is, even if that works, I haven't necessarily solved the problem. Maybe the PC can just boot now anyway, for a while, but the underlying problem is still extant and waiting to pounce. So in an ideal world, I'd clone that disk, but before powering off to switch the cables I'd start running some stress tests to try and figure out which component the problem is coming from, just in case it isn't the boot ssd. A friend suggests Prime95 and Furmark to test the PSU, and Crystaldiskmark to check the speed of the SSDs to see if that shows obvious degradation. But I'd want to clone the disk first, because the point of running those PSU tests is to see if they cause the PC to shut off, and I'm working on the assumption that I'll never get it to boot again. Except, the destination SSD is a Samsung, which (I'm told) means using "Samsung Data Migration Software for Consumer SSD" to do the cloning, and that software flashes up a warning that says "Your computer will be shutdown after Data Migration in 20 seconds." So it's either clone the disc OR run the tests. What I'd like to do now is just clone that disk and hope for the best. Is that sensible, or should I do anything else first? Recent changes: Nothing at all. BUT. There is one clue that might be to do with it. What kicked this off was a sudden power cut. The first failed boot happened when I tried to power the PC back on after the trip switch went (you know, the main switch on the fuse box for our home that cuts if there's a surge to prevent you getting shocked), cutting all the electricity to our flat. We don't know what caused it. There is a thing that happens with our oven sometimes that trips the switch, I tried explaining it but it made this post unacceptably long, anyway it wasn't that this time. So, maybe it was the PC? Maybe the power brick did something wrong, and popped, and the switch tripped, and now the PSU Is broken in a specific way that means it can draw enough power to get partway through boot, but no further? Or at least, that was my (ignorant, desperate) theory, until the computer randomly booted up and was able to run games etc. So I guess that's that idea out the window. More clues: 1) While it was still not getting through startup, I watched the light sequence on the motherboard, and although I don't know what they're supposed to do, I can tell you that it ended up with one green light at the top of the column and no red ones. So, that seems good? There was a red one early in the sequence, but it quickly went away. 2) The boot sequence took absolutely ages, including the time it finally worked. Which leads me to the last bit... The thing I bet was a warning sign that I just ignored for two years So, ever since I've had this motherboard/CPU/power supply installed, which was February 2020 when my last PC suddenly died even more thoroughly and just as mysteriously and I took it as an opportunity to upgrade instead of fixing it, there's been TWO things wrong with it. 1) It can't go into sleep mode. Well, it can go into sleep mode, but it can't come out again. Instead, even though you can wake it up with the keyboard or mouse, it'll perform a full boot, so nothing you left open is left open. So instead I just leave it on overnight, or switch it off altogether. 2) It has always taken two full minutes to boot up. Yes, from an SSD. I thought it was because I had too many external HDDs plugged in, which I absolutely do. I'm terrible at organising files so I just fill one HDD, buy another bigger one, back stuff up onto it, fill the rest up, buy another bigger one, etc. I have now filled all my motherboard's SATA and USB ports, and rely on a USB hub for the rest, which plugs in via my motherboard's one USB-C slot. I know. And in fact, now I think about it, I have noticed those two minutes seeming to last a bit longer, and thinking, well it's not as if I actually ran a timer, maybe I'm wrong. Or, if I did start a timer, just to check, it's not as if I was careful about when I started it. So, yeah. That could have been a sign. But nobody's ever been able to explain any reason that could possibly happen, so I've just assumed it was a thing about my current setup. And maybe it's because: 3) When I built it, I nearly broke the CPU. I put the heatsink on badly and had to remove it, but the thermal paste was stickier than I thought and it pulled the CPU up with it, without releasing its lever, and as a result a couple of the pins bent. I was devastated. And then I straightened them, and then I installed it again just in case it would work, and it did. I wrote the long boot time off as "well maybe that was the short boot time pin, I DUNNO" and just got on with life. I still don't know what problems you can expect in these circumstances, but I assumed that it would probably just not work at all, rather than exhibit small idiosyncrasies, and since it was working, I was prepared to carry on and let it. So yeah, that might be relevant! -- Operating system: Windows 10 System specs: I wish I could tell you. I'd look it up in my purchase history, but Aria PC's website is now an apology that they've shut down. We can but speculate. It's an ASUS motherboard that was considered good in early 2020, this much I know, with a Ryzen 9 CPU (I remember that because it sounds like rise-and-shine lol) and 4x8gb RAM. If anyone has ideas that require knowing the models of other bits, I'm happy to open it up and poke about as needed. Um, but, just for now I'd rather do this without shutting down, so I might prefer to hunt about in the attic in case I kept the boxes rather than shut down, pull bits out and look at the serial numbers that way. If it needs doing, tell me, and I'll do it. So yeah in summary I'm bad at computers and being succinct. Apologies if this made no sense, this has done a NUMBER on my brain. It's like 24 hours later and I haven't got my appetite back, or stopped shivering! Foofsh. Location: UK I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes Buml0r fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Oct 25, 2022 |
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Oct 25, 2022 21:34
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Run this to check your drive health: https://www.hdsentinel.com/download.php If any have issues then you need to copy the data from the failing drive(s) elsewhere and then disconnect the bad drive(s). If the computer won't turn on again I'd disconnect all the drives and peripherals and see if that helps get into the BIOS quicker. The more things you have plugged in the more likely one failing part will cause the whole machine to act like it is now. PS The booting problem could be caused by many different hardware issues. Failing PSU (if it's older/cheaper), bad RAM, failing drive. CPU is less likely but since you mentioned it's damaged it's a possibility.
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Oct 26, 2022 23:54
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