PC won't boot, just black screen, flashing cursor

[Lysrin]

So I was using my main PC no problem yesterday afternoon. I shut it down to go out, and it might have installed a patch before shutdown, I didn't pay much attention unfortunately as that is a common occurrence. Then came home, turned on PC and ended up with just a black screen with a little white flashing cursor. I can get into the BIOS and have tried changing a few things there, namely fast boot settings, but no success. Boot drive is selected correctly, CPU is reporting normal temps, RAM shows up fine, nothing overclocked. I did a quick search last night and some pointed the finger at USB devices so I unplugged everything, plugged in PS2 keyboard to boot. Same result. I am running the latest released Windows 10, nothing fancy. OS drive is a Crucial M4 256GB SSD so a bit old but still is supposed to have tonnes of life left and isn't full. Going to try disconnecting all the drives tonight and just connecting the OS drive to see if there is some conflict. Try to bring things back one by one.

Just wondered before I start tearing everything apart whether or not this issue rings any bells for any of you and you might just say "oh! That is just setting X somehow got changed. Change it back." A guy can dream right? :biggrin:

 

[Shadowmeph]

it is more like an OS problem if you are seeing a blank screen and a cursor maybe try the win 10 disk to see if you can recover your OS.
read this blank screen with blinking cursor at boot to win10 - Microsoft Community

 

[Lysrin]

OK thanks for that. I'll check it out. I was trying to get to safe mode like the old days but couldn't get there. Maybe the Win10 disk is the way to go to get there now.

I would certainly rather it be a software problem and not a hardware problem!

 

[KaptCrunch]

I say its hardware like storage device is corrupt and disk check is scanning drive

 

[Lysrin]

I am writing this from my main PC. I have it back up again but it doesn't make sense. Here's what happened:

1. I made a Windows 10 install USB using the media creation tool (thanks Shadowmeph).

2. Booted with it and tried a Startup Repair. It reported that it couldn't repair.

3. I tried to use the System Restore option. It gave me a weird error about not being able to perform a system restore because I hadn't selected the Windows installation to use. I only have one Windows installation on the PC. Not sure if it was seeing the original Windows 8.1 and the 10 upgrade on my PC, or if it was somehow seeing the USB stick and the C drive?

4. At that point I figured this wasn't going to work so I used the recovery option to shutdown the PC. Removed the USB stick. Powered up the PC and voila! I am back to normal.

5. I powered down, attached all my USB devices thinking perhaps that was still the issue. Powered back up and everything came back up fine and has been running ever since!

6. I ran a disk error check on all the drives in my PC and Windows didn't find any errors.

7. When everything booted correctly Windows did report that updates were installed, so perhaps something went off the rails during the update and the recovery, although it didn't appear to do anything, actually was able to right that? Grasping here...

So glad to be back up, but certainly a bit perplexed as to what happened and wondering will it happen again. Mysterious...

 

[ZZLEE]

Maybe another story of why not to install Win 10 or is that me. ??

 

[Lysrin]

Har har :haha: Could be, but I certainly haven't had issues up until this point. Who knows?

 

[MARSTG]

I think is your SSD. Make sure is on the latest firmware. Sometimes it helps disconnecting the power cable for a few seconds and reconnect. M4 is iffy at times, I lost the system 3 times in a 2 month period due to hooking up one M4 with a Sandisk ssd in raid 0, on z87 and z97 chipsets. It can be stellar when working alone but can be iffy. Mine was on the latest firmware and I still have it and works fine in ahci mode in a laptop but I don't think I will be keeping it too long. It has like 12000 power on hours.

 

[Lysrin]

Thanks MARSTG. I'll check that out if problems reappear. Believe I am already on latest firmware but worth a check.

 

[AkG]

Sounds like you may have been hit by KB3140743 'bug' that is biting a lot of peeps in the ass.

How to Fix Issues Caused by Windows 10 Cumulative Update KB3140743
https://nh.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/48qs4y/fix_update_kb3139907_and_cumulative_update/