[HELP] PC Will Not Boot Windows

IanMinatani · October 4, 2020

Hello everyone! I've been trying to help troubleshoot my friends issue for a while now, to no avail. Please offer any help you can. His PC is the:

Corsair Vengeance 5180

CPU: i7-8700
GPU: GeForce RTX 2080
Mobo: b360
RAM: 2x8gb DDr4 2666
Storage 1: Force MP300
Storage 2: Seagate 2tb HDD
OS: Windows 10

Essentially, on the night of 10/3 he got a blue screen of death and decided to call it a night, he restarted the computer and went to bed. The next morning his PC was on UEFI screen. Restarting PC results in a return to BIOS; enabling Optane Genie in bios (he does NOT have optane drive) results in an endless windows/Vengeance startup loop.

We have tried fiddling with UEFI settings, most notably: boot priorities and BBS Boot Options, Fast Boot On/Off, Optane Genie On/Off, returning to default settings.
We have also tried using Windows 10 Installation Media to attempt to repair or restore his system. The repair/troubleshoot did nothing. The restore had two options, one from 10/3 afternoon, and one from 10/2; both was "not completed successfully."

The pickle of the situation is compounded by: I'm not near his PC, can only discord call him. They can't easily access the internals of the PC (to re-insert ram or unplug and replug drives).

Thank you for all y'alls help!

P.S. I posted this in "Windows" forum too, not sure which is correct, so I added here also.

Airdragonz · October 4, 2020

Sounds to me like the drive died or got corrupted somehow. Check bios to see if the drive's efi partition is still listed as a boot option. If not, then at the very least the efi partition became corrupted.

IanMinatani · October 5, 2020

1 minute ago, Airdragonz said:

Sounds to me like the drive died or got corrupted somehow. Check bios to see if the drive's efi partition is still listed as a boot option. If not, then at the very least the efi partition became corrupted.

Both the drives are detected in bios as connected, however only the Force MP300 shows up in BBS Boot options (I believe this drive has the Win10 install).

I don't know how to check the efi partition specifically, unless I misunderstood.

Thanks for the help btw; if it is corrupted, then what's my next step?

Airdragonz · October 5, 2020

1 minute ago, IanMinatani said:

if it is corrupted, then what's my next step?

You said Windows installation media was unable to repair it, but the drive is still detected so your friend will have to back up as much data from the drive as possible to someplace else and then reformat the drive, then attempt to reinstall windows and restore everything. If he doesn't have a spare OS drive lying around, he could use a flash drive with linux or windows installed to it to back up everything and reformat.

IanMinatani · October 5, 2020

1 minute ago, Airdragonz said:

You said Windows installation media was unable to repair it, but the drive is still detected so your friend will have to back up as much data from the drive as possible to someplace else and then reformat the drive, then attempt to reinstall windows and restore everything. If he doesn't have a spare OS drive lying around, he could use a flash drive with linux or windows installed to it to back up everything and reformat.

Sounds good! Bit more work than I was hoping for, but it's better than having a $2000 paperweight!

Thanks for your help Airdragonz, if it works i'll mark it as solved :^ )