BIOS sees hard drive, but won't boot from it

[Kidneybot]

Hi all, I'm dealing with a frustrating issue and I could use some help because I'm stuck. The short of it is this: My PC was working totally normal, issue free, for a very long time. The other day I put it in my car and drove it for two hours to my college town. Once I set it up again and turned it on, things were different: it now won't boot properly. My hard drive is recognized in the BIOS, but when I try to boot from it, I just get a black screen and a blinking cursor. If I keep turning it off and on again, it eventually loads into the Windows 10 recovery environment and attempts Startup Repair, but that never fixes it.

I've tried disconnecting it from my PC and putting it into a hard drive cage to connect it to a different computer (my laptop) vis USB. It loads fine, and I was able to copy over and backup my important files. I ran chkdsk on it but no issues were found.

I put the hard drive back into my PC and disconnected everything else -- DVD drive, external hard drive, USB drives etc. -- so that the only drive plugged in is my hard drive. The only two items that show up in my BIOS are my hard drive and "Network Card." Still no luck. Any ideas on what I can do? I'd really like to save reinstalling Windows as a last resort if possible.

Relevant information: Windows 10 64-bit, motherboard is ASUS Z-87 A, 12 GB of RAM, GPU is Nvidia GTX 1060. I don't think my RAM sticks are messed up, as I ran Memtest on them recently and no errors were found.

 

[marksavio]

most likely something happened before you load it up to your car. coz the blinking cursor means your drive's OS got corrupted making it unbootable. an improper shutdown while windows was updating perhaps. or you had windows fast startup enabled causing your computer to "get confused" on its current state. or you removed a secondary drive that was originally there (durign the time you first installed win10).

try attempting to spam shift+F10 during load before the blinking cursor appears. if that cant be done then you may have to get a windows installer to attempt repairs from the link below. and attempt to do startup repairs.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/software-download/windows10

you may have to do the following steps below if windows cant repair automatically.
https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/fix-windows-10-black-screen-with-cursor-error/

 

[Calvin7]

Desktop PCs are not really intended for much mobile use. Going over bumps in a car can jar things loose and even break things. Sometimes the weight of the CPU heatsink/fan can crack the socket from bouncing around.

You might want to remove such parts and the video card when transporting a PC. You have to use some common sense.

 

[shekyc]

What do you mean by it loads fine? Booted from it or able to see things inside? After some shocks on the car, if you use a HDD, there is a potential to be damaged. You need to check whether it's "hard" or "soft" damaged. If it's soft, you can rebuild the boot manager following https://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.thewindowsclub.com/fix-bootmgr-missing-windows-7/amp&ved=2ahUKEwiQh4b7g9zYAhUFp5QKHbfMB0EQFjABegQIExAB&usg=AOvVaw2Rf6PjoQKHXO4IJNd0KUTP&ampcf=1
Reminder: change to ssd if you're still using HDD for Windows.

 

[Kidneybot]

Hey everyone, thanks for the responses, I really appreciate it.

As an update, it looks like things have now gotten worse? When I turn on my PC, now I have trouble even getting to the BIOS; after pressing the power button I see a blank black screen and the PC just shuts off, but sometimes the ASUS logo will show up. When I try to hit F2 to go into the BIOS my PC freezes or shuts off.

I'm wondering now if the problem is the motherboard, or something else. It's worth mentioning that I actually had a problem like this 7 months ago: I moved my PC two hours to my college town, and turned it on to find that my PC was slow and having trouble reading my hard drive. I suspected it to be a motherboard problem after doing things like switching around SATA cables etc, but I ended up fixing the issue by just buying a new hard drive and installing Windows on it. I'm wondering if the problem I'm facing now could be linked to that somehow? For what it's worth, I've moved my PC between towns like this at least 10 times before these two incidents and there was never a problem, so this is a new issue.

What do you mean by it loads fine? Booted from it or able to see things inside?

When I remove my hard drive and put it into a USB cage to load it into my other PC (laptop), the hard drive is read and shows up in the file explorer, and I can perform file transfers from it.

 

[dudio]

I would remove EVERYTHING from the PC, and re-do the build again to confirm that all the hardware (including the CPU) is seated correctly. Re-do all the power connections.

 

[shekyc]

Hey everyone, thanks for the responses, I really appreciate it.

As an update, it looks like things have now gotten worse? When I turn on my PC, now I have trouble even getting to the BIOS; after pressing the power button I see a blank black screen and the PC just shuts off, but sometimes the ASUS logo will show up. When I try to hit F2 to go into the BIOS my PC freezes or shuts off.

I'm wondering now if the problem is the motherboard, or something else. It's worth mentioning that I actually had a problem like this 7 months ago: I moved my PC two hours to my college town, and turned it on to find that my PC was slow and having trouble reading my hard drive. I suspected it to be a motherboard problem after doing things like switching around SATA cables etc, but I ended up fixing the issue by just buying a new hard drive and installing Windows on it. I'm wondering if the problem I'm facing now could be linked to that somehow? For what it's worth, I've moved my PC between towns like this at least 10 times before these two incidents and there was never a problem, so this is a new issue.

What do you mean by it loads fine? Booted from it or able to see things inside?

When I remove my hard drive and put it into a USB cage to load it into my other PC (laptop), the hard drive is read and shows up in the file explorer, and I can perform file transfers from it.

In this case, try resetting the bios by a button or a jumper on the mb. The last time i faced this problem was fixed by the backup bios on a gigabyte dual bios motherboard.
You mb don't support dual bios, so anything is much riskier, just try to fix it, but seems that the board maybe bricked.

 

[ultrautoob]

Try starting the computer with everything but any sort of storage USBs or devices. If you have anything connected to you’re pronter, remove it and attempt to start it up. If the problem persists, attempt to go into your bios and make sure you computer is booting the computer from your hard drive and nothing else. If it is attempting to boot from any storage USB, it will create that error. If in your bios it says it is booting from the correct hard drive, the hard drive may be faulty (did you recently buy a new one? If not, you may be due to buy a new one). If the problem still persists, then it is faulty and you should bring it to GeekSquad. Unless you don’t mind losing all your programs and files, make sure you tell them that. Tell them to create an exact clone off of your hard drive, or they may delete everything. If you don’t want to spend your money at Geek Squad, buy a new windows disk or try a system repair/rollback.

 

[Kidneybot]

Chiming in to say that I ended up just replacing my motherboard with a fresh one and that fixed my issue. It was a bit of a drastic move but I was tired of playing detective with this issue for so many months, and I'm glad that it worked out. Thanks for the responses, everyone.