Desktop PC Died...next step?

Banjo33

Banjo33

Line Up and Wait
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Banjo33
My PC has officially died. It’s a Gateway with an i5 and about 3-4 years old. When I power it up, I get a black screen and “Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key” message. If I Ctrl-Alt-Del, it says “Preparing Automatic Repair”, then about 20 secs later it says “Diagnosing your PC” , 30 secs later it says “Repairing disk errors” for about 20 seconds, then repeats with the “Peparing Automatic Repair” and then goes black (I’ve left it on for days). I’ve unplugged all peripherals and attempted these reboots at least a dozen times.

I remember this computer came with a product code allowing a free upgrade to W10, so I did that. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a Boot disk with it or create one. Although, I “think” it had a partitioned drive that backed everything up, but don’t think I can access it without windows. I’m not sure where else to go with this?

Anyone have any ideas?
 
Call the troubleshooter.

When he shows up, tell him you are having trouble with the computer and you want him to shoot it.
 
A smart phone is all you need.
 
AggieMike88 said:
Call the troubleshooter.

When he shows up, tell him you are having trouble with the computer and you want him to shoot it.
Click to expand...

Now why would I pay someone to shoot it when I could shoot it myself? Sounds like a lot more fun!

In all seriousness, I was about 20% of the way through entering my airplane logbooks into a spreadsheet that I created and would really like to not have to start over.
 
Best bet for getting your files back is to burn a linux live CD or thumb drive on another computer, boot the live linux and copy your files off the hard drive if it's even readable.
 
Backups for what exactly?

The system backed up to either a separate internal hard drive or the petitioned drive...been a while since I’ve looked at it. Not sure how/if I can Boot from that?

I was able to create a recovery disc from my laptop and get into some recovery type options...but they don’t seem to doing anything.
 
If you want to keep it, you could get a new drive and install win10 from USB. It's"supposed" to recognise your hardware and activate auto magically if you install the same version (64/32 bit, home or pro). Or if you don't care about the files you could reformat and install over it, but from the sound of your error, it's probably toast or degrading.
 
Banjo33 said:
Backups for what exactly?

The system backed up to either a separate internal hard drive or the petitioned drive...been a while since I’ve looked at it. Not sure how/if I can Boot from that?

I was able to create a recovery disc from my laptop and get into some recovery type options...but they don’t seem to doing anything.
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The system sounds like the main hard disk failed to me from the limited info.

If a separate drive great. You’ll be able to restore from it after a reinstall of the operating system onto a new drive.

If it was a partition, maybe not so great. It really depends on if any of that drive is working now or not.

The idea to boot from something and figure out the status of the hard disk (or remove it and attach it to another computer via a USB dock or similar) to ascertain whether it’s alive at all, or completely dead, is a good one. It’s a non-destructive thing to try.

All the “recovery” options, some are going to attempt to write things to the drive and could be destructive or counter productive to getting it back. Be cautious which ones you randomly pick if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you’re REALLY new to handling a hard disk failure I recommend finding someone local who can come by and assist. Someone careful. Your data may still be there and recoverable if the drive is working and something corrupted or overwrote the boot process stuff or corrupted the Operating System.

But if the drive is truly dead, it’ll have to be replaced and an OS loaded and then you’ll need to see if those backups were on that drive or another one. Most home PCs don’t have a second internal real drive and a partition on the main drive is useless for recovery if the drive truly failed.

There are data recovery services that can coax data back from a dead drive. They often swap the guts of the drive with other drive electronics to get them back to life in a clean environment. If there’s things you truly can’t lose on that drive, stop messing with it in any way that will write to it.

If you can lose everything, then the game gets easier. See if drive is dead. If it is, replace it, reinstall OS, reinstall all your software and you are back in business.

It’s really a question of what might be on it that you need back as to how careful to be next.
 
Agree with the above respondents in that there are too many forks in the decision tree right now.

However, just wanted to point out that one way to determine the severity of the failure is to boot to alternate media and have a look at the S.M.A.R.T. logs.
 
asicer said:
Agree with the above respondents in that there are too many forks in the decision tree right now.

However, just wanted to point out that one way to determine the severity of the failure is to boot to alternate media and have a look at the S.M.A.R.T. logs.
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Or just see if the drive even “exists” when booted to a Linux Live CD. :)
 
Alternate media being another computer?

I’ll look at the Linux option.

Best I have come up with is pulling up the command prompt and checking the partitions/volume, which all reflect “healthy”. Bios indicates the hard drive is the priority.
 
Banjo33 said:
Alternate media being another computer?
Click to expand...

Alternate media usually means a live Linux distro such as sysresccd, plop, slacko, PuppyLinux or Clonezilla but could also mean Hiren or Microsoft's system repair disc.

Banjo33 said:
Eh...I’ve got Linuxlive on a cd, but how do I Boot it in the pc?
Click to expand...

Stick it in the CD/DVD/BD drive, turn on the PC and hit the F1/F2/F11/F12/Del key like a madman to get to either the BIOS setup screen or boot drive selection menu, then select or configure for booting from the optical drive.
 
Del enters bios on mine.

Dropped it off with a troubleshooter today. If he can’t fix it, hopefully he can save the files, and then I’ll bring it home to trouble”shoot”!
 
Nate covered the issues... first issue to to make sure your data is safe and/or take measures to copy it out. After that, you've got to decide if you're going to rebuild or get new. If you replace the hard drive, a Win10 install ISO from Microsoft will load up pretty easily and will re-activate based on the previous installation.
 
Banjo33 said:
Del enters bios on mine.

Dropped it off with a troubleshooter today. If he can’t fix it, hopefully he can save the files, and then I’ll bring it home to trouble”shoot”!
Click to expand...
Just buy the 27" MAC you know you want to, :)
 
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