Here I am again. OMG, a very big new problem !!
Windows 7 Pro has gone nutso on me.

We had a power outage yesterday and when I turned my computer back on, it would not boot up, just a black screen with a message on it that said it was unable to boot up and to install a boot cd so I put in the factory cd and it said, "Windows is installing Files" or something of that sort. Then after a bit it opened a screen with three options: 1. Create an image. 2. Repair and image. 3. Restore to factory settings.

I did everything possible in 1 and 2 and steered away from 3 becaue I felt that would fix it but I would lose all my stuff but nothing worked so I X'd out of the options and it said something to the effect that it would reboot which it did, with boot normally or let us fix it as the options. I chose the latter which ended up telling me that it could not fix it and I was right back to booting up with the factory cd, went through the whole process again, and chose boot normally and it booted up and presto, I am back with everything working ok.

So I thought to be sure everything was ok. I shut down Windows normally and when I turned it back on it was back to ground zero and unable to boot. After crying for five minutes I went back and went through the whole process again.

Sooooooooo..........does anyone have any thoughts on how to fix this?

First disconnect ALL power and hit the power button a couple of times. Reconnect power and try booting.

Second try booting to Safe Mode. If that works try re-booting normal.

Third download a copy of Windows and create install media from
https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technolog ... nload-tool
Boot to the DVD and select to attempt a startup repair.

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Should I shut the computer down by hitting start>shutdown or just leave the computer running and disconnect the power

Shut down normally if the computer is running and Windows is up and running *or* do nothing until the problem happens again -- that is, you are unable to start Windows.
The fact that it is intermittently not starting Windows suggests that there may be a problem with the boot drive or BIOS. Jay's advice to remove the power cable, and if it a laptop, the battery, then hitting the power button a few times is an effort to clear some potentially errant bits from the hardware.
I doubt that it is actually the hard drive, but it certainly could be.
-steve

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

Hi Steve......I think I will wait for a bit before attempting to shut it down again because I want to chat on FB for a while and after that it will be too late at night to monkey with it tonight. Getting into the bios may be a real problem because as the computer starts up, it flashes an American Megatrends Logo,then the bios enter info and immediately goes to unable to boot screen and the whole thing is less than 2 seconds and its so fast, I cant even read the key to press in order to enter.

Anyway, I will give it a try tomorrow and post the results.

Thanks much for your help

Allyson

This might help with entering your BIOS:
https://ami.com/en/tech-blog/top-three- ... ios-setup/

Not mentioned in the above link but may be useful if you can see the 'enter bios info' but simply don't have time to read it... have your finger poised over your <pause> key as you turn the pc on so that as soon as the 'enter bios info' appears immediately hit your <pause> key, this will normally stop the bios loading in it's tracks and allow you to read the required information... if i recall correctly tapping your spacebar or enter key will resume the bios... or if very lucky depending on your bios, simply hitting the required key to enter the bios will resume the bios and load the bios.

Good luck

Thanks for the link Doddie. The "Del" key got me into the bios and I was able to scroll over to "Boot" and then down to "Boot Sequence" For reasons unknown to me at that point, all the options in the bios seemed to just lock up. I could not make any further selections, even the "Esc" Key would not let me exit. I clicked on every key on the keyboard with no success so my only option left was to do a manual shut down.

Now comes the really weird part. When I pushed the computer start button, the computer started right up just as though nothing ever happened....it took me right to my password log in and from there to my desktop.

hallelujah.....hallelujah....HALLELUJAH !!!!!!!!!!!!

I have rebooted it several times since then with no problems. Now I don't know if it was Jay's pushing the start button with the computer off, Steve bringing up the Bios, or Doddie helping me get in there but thanks to all of you for helping me........and once again

HALLELUJAH

Can you now access the BIOS and see your boot sequence without it locking up?

I have not tried to do that but I will later tonight and let you know.

As far as what seems to have fixed the problem I doubt that it was getting into the BIOS as you were not really able to do anything there. I assume that the recommendation of going to the BIOS was to make sure that the boot order and drive priority were correct. Since the system would boot at times I doubt that this was ever a factor. If the boot order or drive priority were off in the BIOS the system should never have booted, period.

I would have to consider the probable solution to be one of two things...

1) The removing power and hitting the power button cleared a flaw in a hardware device. It has to be remembered that, without totally removing power, the system is never really totally off.

2) Just by doing repeated re-starts Windows was able to correct itself.

Bottom line is that it seems that the system is OK but I'd also like to know if you can get into the BIOS without crashing now. What concerns me is that you crashed the system by going to the BIOS. This has nothing to do with Windows as the BIOS is pretty much done before Windows even attempts to load. However, it could indicate an issue with the hard drive which can be damaged by a power failure.

I strongly suggest that you go to Device Manager to see who made your hard drive if you don't already know. Go to the manufacturer of the drive and download and install their drive diagnostics. Run a full diagnostics. Depending on the software this can take a LONG time.

Sorry if I seem to be putting a damper on what seems to be a fixed system but, if I have one at all, hardware is my forte. With a failure to boot after a power loss I HAVE to worry about the hard drive. One of the reasons that I have and recommend a battery backup on a desktop is for power outages. Where an outage can harm a hard drive is if it happens when windows is writing to the drive. Actually this can happen with any write to the drive but a Windows write is more likely. Windows is writing to the drive and the system loses power... the write is never finished so the file being written is never 'closed' or finished. This causes the file to not be accessible, system can't boot as it cannot access a needed file.

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Hi Jay and Allyson

One thing I strongly recommend is a good imaging program and it's heavy use.

One of the tests I run on all imaging programs is take and image and once I am comfortable the restores work, I will start a restore, let it run about a 1/4 of the way and then hit the power reset button. Totally trashes the disk from the point of view of the computer booting, but I 've never seen a problem with hardware doing this. A good imaging program should be able to do another restore, and leave you with a fine system.

Pete

I have tried repeated shut downs and reboots and although the computer goes through this process and boots back up normally now, I am no longer able to get into the bios by pressing the "Del" key. I really don't have a need to go there but it's odd to me that I can no longer do it. By staring at the screen during boot up, I was able to read what it said about the bios which was, "Press the Source Key to Enter the Bios". I looked up the American Megatrends Key and it is "Del". Also strange to me Jay is the Hard Drive. How can it be defective if it is working now?

A hard drive can have issues that are intermittent. The drive is probably fine. I'd just run diagnostics to be safe.

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Hi Jay......I don't know if it's an issue but the drive does not have much space left to download anything and I sometimes get messages that say the file is too big to download. Also, I have been thinking that I should put in the new 2TB that I have sitting on the shelf gathering dust so how can I go about getting all the info on the old drive onto the new drive in the event I continue to have trouble with booting? Is this a "start from scratch" thing and boot up to the new empty drive and then do the transfers or can I do that system image thing?

You should be able to transfer everything to the new drive on the fly. Most imaging software will also have a clone function. A clone is what you would want. This will make the new drive just like the old but it will be larger. The manufacturer of the new drive may also have dedicated cloning software.

If you go to File Manager or My Computer and check the properties of the old drive what does it show as total capacity and, also, free space?

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On the fly? To me that means "copy and paste" but I don't think that's what you mean. So, I have the new drive and I have the old drive with all the stuff on it. You mentioned cloning software so after you tell me what to buy, I will have the old drive installed in the computer, the new drive laying on the table alongside the cloning software. What happens next??

Max capacity of the drive on my computer is 425gb with less than 2gb of free space.

First the 2 GB of free space on the old drive is problematic. For a drive to function properly it needs to have a minimum of 10% free space. With your old drive that would be 42.5 GB. Personally I would not run that drive under ~70 GB free space.

On the cloning software you do not need to buy anything as there are plenty of free options. Still, we need to know the make of the new drive to be able to give the best recommendation as to cloning software. There are just SO many options it is, SOMETIMES, best to go with the drive manufacturer's software.

Here is the basic procedure.
1) Mount the new drive in the system's tower.
2) Make sure that the drive is seen by Windows. Initialize the drive in Drive Management if it is not seen.
3) Download and install cloning software.
4) Run the software and select to clone selecting your old drive as the source and the new drive as the destination.
5) Let the software do it's thing then disconnect the data cable from both drives and connect the data cable from the old drive to the new. Switching the data cables keeps you from having to go in your BIOS to select what is the boot drive.

Give it a try and see what happens. Even if there are issues you still have the old drive intact.

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Hitachi E7K1000 1TB Sata

That was my thinking Jay, however i did have a couple of other thoughts...

a) The BIOS may be corrupt, even if it appears intermittently functional.

That Allyson can no longer access the BIOS, when she did she had limited success and functionality, suggests the BIOS is corrupt.
(HDD presence is not required to access the BIOS, it should be accessible on a bare bones system whether or not a HDD is installed, that it is isn't now accessible suggests re-flashing the BIOS might help.)

b) The Master Boot Record of the HHD may also be corrupt, from what she says the data appears to be intact when she can access the HDD (not guaranteed afict), this suggests the MBR may be corrupt.

To rule out either of those i personally would re-flash the BIOS, and rebuild the MBR on the affected HDD, then see where i am.

At the very least, if this is a multi drive system i would try removing/unplugging the HDD and try booting without it. See if i can then access the BIOS... if i can then the HDD MBR could be the culprit that's causing the BIOS to 'short-circuit'.

That said, a 'full' drive doesn't help so if any and all data can be backed up this would be the time to do it before progressing further.

Hi Jay, I'm going to try and do the clone so if you can give me the best recommended software, I will download it and give this a try.

Of course I'm going to offer what I have on my system as I am familiar.

1) EaseUS ToDo. This is actually imaging software that includes cloning. This is free software.
https://www.easeus.com/download/tbf-download.html

2) Acronis True Image. This is not free software but has a trial period that should do the job.
https://www.acronis.com/en-us/?utm_sour ... onis%20Gen

Just make sure to switch the hard drive cables between the drives after the clone is done so that the new drive is the active boot drive. You could select the new drive to boot in your BIOS but, since you are inside the system anyway, swapping cables is probably the easiest. Regardless please remove the cables from the old drive before trying to boot to the new drive. We just want to protect that drive.

Also please pay attention to Doddie's points as there could very well be a BIOS issue. His thought about the MBR (an important area on the hard drive) being corrupt may be possible but I have to doubt. If the MBR is bad I would expect an always fail situation instead of intermittent. BTW, MBR stands for Master Boot Record.

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@Jay, i suspect starting with re-flashing the BIOS would seem like a no-brainer, I'm not sure if you've picked up on a couple of Allyson's comments regarding her BIOS so i'll highlight them...

On Wednesday Allyson said:

Two days later Allyson posted:


Both of those suggest strongly there is something not right with the BIOS.

As for the HDD MBR, i have had corrupt MBR's several times over the years that on occasion would still allow me to access the HDD after multiple reboots, more often than not though, as you say a corrupt MBR would lock me out of the HDD (or partition). Rebuilding the MBR would on most occasions restore reliable access to the HDD (or partition), though of course nothing is ever guaranteed, I've had two occasions (that i can remember) where no matter what i did the MBR couldn't be repaired and all data was lost (hence why it would be a good idea to backup any and all data now while it's available before going there).
On at least one other occasion rebuilding the MBR resulted in a lot of corrupt files after the rebuild, this was on a data drive holding mostly mp3's and backup freeware programmes etc so not a big deal... i never did work out how files could be corrupt after rebuilding the MBR but i do recall the drive would take over 15 minutes to be fully 'read' by File Explorer prior to the rebuild so perhaps they were corrupted at the same time as the MBR became corrupt and it wasn't until the MBR was rebuilt that windows recognised them as such?

Anyways, hope that helps.

Oh, I see nothing wrong with flashing the BIOS but I'd reset the CMOS first by removing power AND the CMOS battery. Unless the mother board has a utility to flash the BIOS from within Windows it would be sort of difficult to flash when the BIOS can't be reached.

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I disagree that reinstalling/flashing the BIOS needs to be carried out from within Windows, in fact this a relatively new procedure, historically to update or re-flash a BIOS it used to require a floppy disk that was bootable... in most cases most motherboard suppliers still have various options available, eg USB etc.

In any case, if the information stored on CMOS is corrupt you can likely remove the battery until the cow's come home but you will never restore full functionality until a working BIOS is held there... in a worst case scenario, the CMOS chip might need replaced but I've never come across a need for that.

Removing power and removing the CMOS battery will of course do no harm in this instance, in fact it could potentially help but i doubt it will help if the BIOS currently held on the CMOS chip is corrupt.

cf:
What is the difference between BIOS and CMOS?
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001360.htm

How To Update The BIOS Of Your Computer's Motherboard In 5 Steps
https://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-upd ... rd-5-steps

I feel like I'm preaching to the converted but that is not my intention.

@Allyson et al, the above links are posted for information only, don't action them unless you're sure you know what you're doing .

I am at a standstill here because the preaching is way over my head. It seems that there appears to be a problem with the bios on my computer so if I were to clone this hard drive, the new source drive would end up with the same bios problem, right? So what do I do to fix the bios before attempting the clone?