No Bios... MB or GPU?

[MKane]

So one day while tinkering with some game dev my computer suddenly shut down as I started doing a render. I tried to start it and got BSOD - Critical Process Died. Long story short... I went into safe mode and didnt learn much. Did a system restore and ever since then I haven't been able to get back into safe mode.  I can't boot into the bios, when I try, I get what you see in the photo. I can't even use an installation media usb to just reinstall windows. But I can use a recovery drive and with that I accessed command prompt, formatted the UEFI partition to fat32 (it was originally labeled "System Reserve" and had the partition type of "NTFS" but I feel that this was probably due to the cmos reset if that's possible because my Windows directory has an EFI folder for UEFI format) and rebuilt it using bcdboot (I spent a lot of time playing with bcdboot, bcdedit, and bootrec before I learned to format and rebuild the partition. I bought a new graphics card but it's not displaying anything so I'm still using the old one. I swapped the RAM sticks around and tried running with just one but no success. I also haven't found any information on why the bios looks the way that it does.

 

So that's where I'm at... has anyone seen what's in that photo before? And any other help is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance 

[kb5zue]

Sorry, but the only thing I can think of is to re-partition the drive and reinstall your operating system.  At least that is most likely and probably the things that I would do.  I know it's a pain, but that's the way I see it.

 

Take care and good luck.

[SImoHayha]

> cannot get into BIOS

Uhh I think your MOBO might've shit the bed possibly.  It might just flat out died. OR maybe a CPU issue might've occured.

Or the GPU PCIE slot is dead, try the bottom PCIE and see if that works w the graphics card.

IF all else fails if you have a IGPU on your CPU you could plug the Video cable into the motherboard and see if that works.

[MKane]

Little update:

 

Since I formatted the UEFI partition and rebuilt it I now boot to the boot manager but it has the error shown in the photo.

 

Also I did get to boot into the installation media usb by unplugging my SSD and having the USB plugged in. But there was an error about not finding drivers even after I plugged the SSD back in and tried to do the install process again. (Second photo)

 

It seems like bcdedit cant find the configuration data store. I can do bcdedit with the /store argument to the BCD directly but if I run bootrec /rebuildbcd it says "The requested system device cannot be found" and if I run bcdedit without the /store argument then it says "The boot configuration data store could not be opened." 

 

Also I have the annoying "Access is denied" when I run bootrec /fixboot.

 

[SImoHayha]

4 hours ago, MKane said:

 

 

 

at this point just reinstall windows, backup any data off that drive. Then reinstall it' probably be much more simpler than this currently.

[MKane]

So I'm a bit late on this reply, but ultimately the problem is resolved now. Turns out my SSD was in the MBR format and everything I was doing only works for GPT formatted drives. Although I didn't see the GPT indicator in "diskpart" I initially thought it might've been a bug since it was a newer drive, but it wasn't. Note to self, format new drives to GPT before installing Windows on them even if they are straight from the store. Once I realized it was an MBR format I decided it was best to just backup my data and reinstall Windows since I would prefer to switch to a GPT format. As mentioned in one of my previous posts this wasn't an option in the beginning because it just wouldn't work plus I just wanted to have the satisfaction of properly fixing the issue, but I think reinstalling the media installation on the USB solved the installation problem.

For those that face a similar issue...

The screen glitch to my surprise was caused by the GPU even though I was able to get into the Windows Recovery with no problem. The faulty GPU I imagine just wasn't getting initialized soon enough to render the post screen which was the black and red screen (not in the previous screenshot) nor the bios which was the blue and pink screen (in the previous screenshot).

My issue was primarily that the boot record got corrupted somehow. While it CAN be fixed for an MBR formatted drive it is a little more tricky and I didn't want to keep the MBR drive anyway so for me I opted to format it to GPT. However here are two great videos which are individually a fix-all solution to boot record problems for both MBR and GPT formatted drives. The video on MBR also explained why the "bootrec /fixboot" command doesn't work and kept saying access denied, which no other articles seem to care to explain. Simply put MBR recovery tools are no longer supported by Microsoft since it is an old format. So first you will need to figure out if you have an MBR or GPT drive then watch the video for that type... 

 

 

I wouldn't wish this weird issue on my worst enemy but when someone else inevitably does experience this, hopefully, this will help.

 

One additional note... My motherboard is so old that my new GPU didn't initially work, it was just a black screen but my monitor light was on as if there was a signal. Thankfully the old GPU worked enough that after fixing the boot issue, I could install my motherboard bios and chipset updates and this allowed the new GPU to work. I mention this because in my original post, I mentioned that my new GPU didn't display anything and this is why.