Computer help, Desktop

[Brisco 130]

Hoping someone with more computer knowledge might be able to help.

 

Desktop was working fine this morning. No hardware changes and no software changes that I know of.

 

When I turned it on this afternoon, it locked in the windows open screen. Reset the power- it went to windows recovery. Locked out. Tried again, it opened finally. Went to open IE, it froze, went to black screen, looking for boot device. Reset, went into Bios, checked boot order, seems correct. It opened once in safe mode but won't again. Thinking hard drive crash.

 

Windows 7-64

MSI  Z77A motherboard

16GB Ram

EVGA GTX 680 Videocard

Thermaltake 850w powersupply

128 GB SSD primary harddrive

1.5 TB backup harddrive

 

Hoping I have a recent image backup on the backup hard drive.

 

Thank You

 

Shane

[YankeeSC 1,204]

Thinking hard drive crash.

 

Sounds that way, but it's not clear what it is doing now.  What happens when you power on?

[T Bill 649]

Before you go messing with the hard drive, re-seat the memory, oxidation some times does strange things.

[Malsua 1,422]

Before you go messing with the hard drive, reset the memory, oxidation some times does strange things.

 

What he said.  Remove and replace the memory.  If the problem still occurs,  hopefully you have two or four chips, remove one, try it if it fails, then swap the installed chip with the removed chip, try it, rinse repeat.   Your crashes sound more memory than hard drive, although it can be either.

[Krdshrk 3,877]

How old is the hard drive, too?  SSD's don't crash like mechanical or else I'd say it was the hard drive...

[Malsua 1,422]

How old is the hard drive, too?  SSD's don't crash like mechanical or else I'd say it was the hard drive...

 

I've got somewhere north of 40 SSDs in my realm of control and I've had 1 issue.    It was a 120gb samsung Evo and I don't know what happened but the boot sector got borked.   I pulled the drive, chkdsk'd it in a different machine, it fixed a problem, then replaced back in the original machine and it rebooted.   A day or two later, I cloned it onto an 850 Pro and sold the drive off on Ebay.

 

I have several very high traffic rip stations and all those are Samsung Pro drives...most of which are m.2.  I've not had any issue with those at all.

[Brisco 130]

T Bill: Tried remove and reset ram, great idea. Same result though

 

Krdshrk: 3-4 years, bought components- new egg/amazon. assembled myself

 

tomk: That's the strange part. It was doing something different each of the first  bunch of restarts. Now the last bunch it goes from Bios screen to black with "reboot and select proper boot device"

 

Thanks for the ideas

[voyager9 3,434]

Sounds like it started with some file corruption that kept windows from booting and has progressed to the boot sector. Probably the drive went bad.

 

You can probably recover some of it by mounting it in another machine and chkdsk or fsck. You may or may not be able to get it to void again tho. If you do clone it soon since the problem could reoccur if it's anything systematic

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[YankeeSC 1,204]

tomk: ... Now the last bunch it goes from Bios screen to black with "reboot and select proper boot device"

 

Thanks for the ideas

 

That's what makes me think it's the drive.  Do you have a bootable drive you can swap out to test?  Try reseating the drive cable as well.

[T Bill 649]

Boot sector virus?

[dino71 7]

Here's my 0.02. I bought a brand new computer during the summer of 2010 and when the first the cold day hit I had the same thing happen to my computer. I took it back to Microcenter in Paterson and then tech opened it up and just slightly pressed down on the memory simm's and boom it fired right up. He told me that the MB / SIMM connection can be weird and as little as a 20 F difference in the environment can cause a problem. Its been 6 years and its been working like a champ since that minor fix. 

[Howard 538]

A few other things to try.  Take out and reseat all boards and take compress air and blow out any and all dust.  Unplug all USB cables and any other cables for everything but the monitor, keyboard and mouse.  I had a similar issue once and it turned out a USB device had an issue and was causing this type of problem.  Do you have a bootable CD you can use and see if the system will boot from it, at least that will let you know if the computer itself is ok or if it is a hard drive.

[DaveR 42]

Add to the list, blowing out the processor and power supply fans, either of these getting dirty and slowing down can cause crashes.

 

Download and run memtest86+, this will give a much better indication of a memory problem,

 

For SSD drives download the manufacturers software that lets you read the SMART details, check the reallocated sector and non recoverable error counts, you may have to run this on another PC if they do not have a bootable media option for the program.  They also might have a diagnostic program you can run on it.

 

If the above is good then install in a second PC as a second drive and run scandisk / checkdisk or whatever disk checking software you have on it, scan for viruses and malware.

 

I have had SSD's develop  unrecoverable errors, but it has not effected their operation,SSD's typically have a small amount of reserved memory to replace the bad areas.

[r4nd0m 4]

What is the current state of the PC? If you power it on, are you able to log in? If you log in, everything freezes? Are you able to open task manager and look at the running processes? Something may have freaked out and is pegging your CPU. A ram issue sounds possible, pull all the ram out, insert one stick and try and boot. If the problem persists try and boot with a different stick of RAM. Can you boot into safe mode with networking? If so, how is the performance?

[Kevin125 4,772]

If you have a second PC that is working properly and will support your SSD, put the SSD in that PC and see if the problem follows the drive.

 

Conversely, if you have a conventional HD that work and is expendable, remove your existing drives and throw the HD in and start a windows install... Or Linux install if you prefer.

 

Try to determine if you other hardware is working properly.

 

Besides the SSD, which are usually more reliable than mechanical disks, there could be a power supply issue. These are common. Mostly catastrophic and obvious but I've seen poorly regulated outputs create issues.

 

If you don't see disk errors in the drive mgt software and the drive behaves the same in another machine, there could be a problem with the boot sector that may or may not be related to a virus.

 

If you suspect that, the best way to deal with it is nuke the drive and start over. You can take a chance mounting the SSD in another machine to copy data you need but you put that other machine at some risk and your new build if you happen to copy infected pdf's for example.

 

Hard to know what the problem is without hands on time, but the SSD or its date, or, the PS are suspect.

[Wavecaster 22]

Sounds a lot like what happened when my SSD died last year. Started with a random freeze/crash and looking for boot device error. Gave it a half hour and it booted back into Windows finally and seemed fine. Good lord do I regret my stupidity here. This was my warning sign, my chance to back everything up. Well I ignored it and within a week it crashed again and this time I would get this error screen: 

 

My SSD was playing hide and seek with me, trying to get it to come up in boot devices or loading windows on another HDD and checking devices. But nothing could ever access the SSD nor get it to boot ever again. Friend of mine opened it up:

 

 

Something (the controller?) fried. If i remember correctly (this was a year ago) It would have still been under OCZ's warranty but because they sold the company, the new company stopped honoring all warranties about a month before this happened. Lost all my personal files, couldn't even get a replacement, and when I was trying to fix my SSD I tilted my desktop and forgot to unplug my 2TB external I used for storage... USB cord tugged it off my desk and it smacked the wood floor hard. Lost everything on that too. It was a really bad day. Circling back though, what brand is your SSD? Because OCZ makes/made COMPLETE GARBAGE. Well regardless of brand it still sounds like a SSD failure. Like others suggested, do what you can to change whatever variables you can. Try SSD in another computer, try a different SSD/HDD with windows in this computer. Unplug anything unnecessary. Anything that can narrow down the root of the problem so you can be 100% sure, but I'd bet in the end a failing SSD will be the culprit.

[Brisco 130]

Thank You all, for all the help so far.

 

I will answer in more detail when I have more time. I believe the SSD is OCZ, and that is the screen I get now. 

 

Had to get the business running on a ultrabook for now, once I get the desktop running- will let everyone what I found

[raz-0 1,259]

I'll second the OCZ SSD experience. 

[Michael2013 56]

I had a similar problem not long ago.

Opened up, vacuumed, let it rest (it was hot).  Had to restore image from backup on the second hard drive.

Works so far...

[Kevin125 4,772]

Bummer. OCZ makes some good ram. Maybe some issues with a certain number of their SSDs.

 

If that's the screen you have now, the SSD is quite possibly dead. Odds of it being the controller on the MoBo or the SATA cable is low.

[My1stGlock 144]

Yea sounds like the SSD is on it's way out. I too had an OCZ. The piece of crap just started booting up with diff issues everytime till it wouldn't boot up no more. I slaved mine and was able to salvage some of the data but there was alot of corruption. Sorry to hear that.....

[r4nd0m 4]

Spinrite has served me well in failing HDD situations in the past.