T
Thomoski
Guest
Hello all,
This is a long one, so I apologise. I've formatted a bit for ease of reading.
Hardware Issues
I'm posting as a last resort as I'm completely stumped on what is causing the issue with my partner's PC. I've tried solution after solution, each either failing or leading to more issues that don't seem to have solutions. I'll run through from start to finish of what happened and what I've tried.
My partner put her Windows 10 pc into sleep mode about a week ago over the weekend and forgot to shut it down completely. After a couple of days in sleep, she tried to wake it up, but it refused to resume normal operation. It continued to show the blinking power light, which it does normally in sleep mode. I suggested turning it off at the power supply and leaving it for a few hours which we did, however the pc wouldnt boot at all after this. I examined it and sure enough, we got fan spin and lights, but no boot. The motherboard doesnt have any onboard POST indicators, so I had no idea if it was even POSTing. I tried the usual thing of removing components to try and get the machine to boot, removing everything, including the CMOS battery and using the clear memory jumpers on the board. After an hour, it seemed to refuse to boot as a result of having one of the RAM sticks installed, so I assumed it was a bad stick (it had actually come from a batch where one was RMA'd a few years ago). I removed it and ordered a replacement part, the PC booted up fine as per normal. I assumed this was the end of the matter, and my partner received the new replacement stick a few days later, same model make, etc and installed it.
Bluescreening begins
Not long after this, the pc began to regularly experience bluescreens with the error code 'UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION' - I found some online troubleshooting guides, but before we could attempt them, we then got a new error 'CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED'. After some googling, it seemed that it might have been a driver issue, we had replaced the pc keyboard a few days before, as well as adding a webcam, so I assumed this might be the cause. We attempted to try and boot into safemode by following the normal process of shift clicking the power button in the start menu, then selecting the safe mode option and restarting. Upon a restart, we entered into the normal menu you'd expect, except we didnt have an option to enter safe mode. We could select a boot mode and restart, but could never actually get into windows in safe mode. This was concerning, so we then tried booting normally to enable the safe mode in the boot settings, but couldn't get back into windows at all. We were stuck in the setup screen. In typical fashion, my partner didnt have a backup or restore point, so we tried a few repair utilities using the command prompt available but had no luck. We tried SFC, but only received errors about the drive being locked if I remember. DISM failed due to a hardware error - which was strange, it was a almost brand new SSD we'd recently migrated her files to as the boot drive. We tried windows repair and couldnt get it to work at all. So I created a windows repair media, a USB sitck I set up using the media creation tool and tried to repair or upgrade from there. We continued to receive errors and the only way to actually get back into windows seemed to be a new install. Thankfully, most of her data was stored in a secondary drive, so we formatted the main disk and resintalled windows from fresh. Thinking this was solved, we started the setup of windows as normal, changing backgrounds etc, installing drivers as usual. We then got more bluescreens with the same 'CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED'. We tried to scan the windows files - DISM check health came back clean, but when we tried Scan Health instead, it errored at 100% with a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION. We did the pending windows update, updated all the drivers we could find and it is still bluescreening at regular intervals.
After a clean install, new drivers, malware scans, I'm completely lost as to what to do, or what may be causing it. Please ask any questions, I can try to supply crash logs, error codes, just let me know what's required. I have some experience in troubleshooting, but not anything in any serious detail and taking the machine to a repair centre in current lockdown rules in effect isn't really an option.
Continue reading...
This is a long one, so I apologise. I've formatted a bit for ease of reading.
Hardware Issues
I'm posting as a last resort as I'm completely stumped on what is causing the issue with my partner's PC. I've tried solution after solution, each either failing or leading to more issues that don't seem to have solutions. I'll run through from start to finish of what happened and what I've tried.
My partner put her Windows 10 pc into sleep mode about a week ago over the weekend and forgot to shut it down completely. After a couple of days in sleep, she tried to wake it up, but it refused to resume normal operation. It continued to show the blinking power light, which it does normally in sleep mode. I suggested turning it off at the power supply and leaving it for a few hours which we did, however the pc wouldnt boot at all after this. I examined it and sure enough, we got fan spin and lights, but no boot. The motherboard doesnt have any onboard POST indicators, so I had no idea if it was even POSTing. I tried the usual thing of removing components to try and get the machine to boot, removing everything, including the CMOS battery and using the clear memory jumpers on the board. After an hour, it seemed to refuse to boot as a result of having one of the RAM sticks installed, so I assumed it was a bad stick (it had actually come from a batch where one was RMA'd a few years ago). I removed it and ordered a replacement part, the PC booted up fine as per normal. I assumed this was the end of the matter, and my partner received the new replacement stick a few days later, same model make, etc and installed it.
Bluescreening begins
Not long after this, the pc began to regularly experience bluescreens with the error code 'UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION' - I found some online troubleshooting guides, but before we could attempt them, we then got a new error 'CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED'. After some googling, it seemed that it might have been a driver issue, we had replaced the pc keyboard a few days before, as well as adding a webcam, so I assumed this might be the cause. We attempted to try and boot into safemode by following the normal process of shift clicking the power button in the start menu, then selecting the safe mode option and restarting. Upon a restart, we entered into the normal menu you'd expect, except we didnt have an option to enter safe mode. We could select a boot mode and restart, but could never actually get into windows in safe mode. This was concerning, so we then tried booting normally to enable the safe mode in the boot settings, but couldn't get back into windows at all. We were stuck in the setup screen. In typical fashion, my partner didnt have a backup or restore point, so we tried a few repair utilities using the command prompt available but had no luck. We tried SFC, but only received errors about the drive being locked if I remember. DISM failed due to a hardware error - which was strange, it was a almost brand new SSD we'd recently migrated her files to as the boot drive. We tried windows repair and couldnt get it to work at all. So I created a windows repair media, a USB sitck I set up using the media creation tool and tried to repair or upgrade from there. We continued to receive errors and the only way to actually get back into windows seemed to be a new install. Thankfully, most of her data was stored in a secondary drive, so we formatted the main disk and resintalled windows from fresh. Thinking this was solved, we started the setup of windows as normal, changing backgrounds etc, installing drivers as usual. We then got more bluescreens with the same 'CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED'. We tried to scan the windows files - DISM check health came back clean, but when we tried Scan Health instead, it errored at 100% with a SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION. We did the pending windows update, updated all the drivers we could find and it is still bluescreening at regular intervals.
After a clean install, new drivers, malware scans, I'm completely lost as to what to do, or what may be causing it. Please ask any questions, I can try to supply crash logs, error codes, just let me know what's required. I have some experience in troubleshooting, but not anything in any serious detail and taking the machine to a repair centre in current lockdown rules in effect isn't really an option.
Continue reading...