[HELP] PC won't boot at all after Windows Update

[Jacob D]

Hi LTT community, I recently came across a rather unexpected problem after updating and rebooting my PC.

After I had been using my PC normally today, I went to reboot the system, but classic Windows prompted me to "Update and Restart." I clicked on this and left the PC to do its update. I soon returned and noticed the PC was running rather slow, and soon noticed that the PC DID NOT boot into my SSD as it had been doing ever since I built it... it instead decided to boot into the Windows I had on the HDD. Confused, I went to restart the PC again and I entered the BIOS, and I found the NVMe SSD was no longer detected. I went to reboot the PC again to see if it would be recognised, but as the motherboard went through its POST codes, it hung in "A0" for a long time. The display then shut off, but the Power LED was on, CPU and case fans were still powered, along with the "Audio Boost" LEDs on my motherboard. So it appeared everything was still receiving power.

I tried holding the power button to restart the PC, but was shocked to find that as everything lit up again, there was still no video, when suddenly, everything turned off by itself. Without me touching anything, the PC turned on again, but alas, there was still no video. This time, though, the PC didn't shut itself off.

Either way, I'm still currently unable to diagnose anything. I pulled out the GPU, HDD, swapped RAM, and cleared CMOS. The system still behaves the same.

 

I'd appreciate any help possible as I don't have a matching platform to test individual components in. I'm curious as to whether the motherboard is dead. I have no way of knowing for sure, though.

 

Thanks a lot!

 

PC Components:

CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K

Mobo: MSI Z97-G43 GAMING

RAM: 16GB DDR3

G. Card: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti

SSD: Gigabyte PCIe NVMe 256GB on a PCIe x4 to M.2 Adapter

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB

OS: Windows 10 1903 64-bit 

 

 

[rEkmAInc1csBnlM6C85H]

Hi Jacob, Welcome to the forums.

 

Have you pulled the SSD? It kind of sounds like it may have failed and since it interfaces directly to PCI-E it can easily hang the POST.

 

Additionally have you tried pulling everything but the bare minimum to POST? I am unsure if you tested the system without the items you mentioned one at a time or all in one go.

[Jacob D]

25 minutes ago, Andrew 1337 said:

Hi Jacob, Welcome to the forums.

 

Have you pulled the SSD? It kind of sounds like it may have failed and since it interfaces directly to PCI-E it can easily hang the POST.

 

Additionally have you tried pulling everything but the bare minimum to POST? I am unsure if you tested the system without the items you mentioned one at a time or all in one go.

Hello Andrew, thanks for your response.

I'm currently in the middle of disassembling the entire PC and running it barebones minimum, and without the graphics card. I've even gone as far as to re-seat the CPU, cooler and reapply the toothpaste Thermal Compound. I'll be back in a bit with the results. I'll see if running it without a boot drive or just the hard drive does anything better. Cheers.

[Jacob D]

I can confirm now that everything works after running it with nothing but the SSD. I'm not sure what may have caused the system to spit out one of my components. I'll be experimenting with the rest of the components from here on out but it's good news that the SSD is working and no data was corrupted. Thanks a lot for the help today.

[rEkmAInc1csBnlM6C85H]

8 minutes ago, Jacob D said:

I can confirm now that everything works after running it with nothing but the SSD. I'm not sure what may have caused the system to spit out one of my components. I'll be experimenting with the rest of the components from here on out but it's good news that the SSD is working and no data was corrupted. Thanks a lot for the help today.

Good to hear, and you are most welcome.

 

Make sure to only make one change at a time (add one hardware item back) as you test.