Black Screen, No Post, No Access to Bios - Suspect Win 10 1709

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greyingblonde

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Feb 4, 2018
23
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510
PC = HP P6-2416a
Motherboard : MS 7778 Ver: 1.0 - Jasmine
Onboard Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GT630
Integrated...not sure which type but AMD
Processor: AMD A10-5700

SYMPTOMS:

1) Windows 10 1709 started bugging me to update on all computers including this one. I ignored it for a while as it seems to come with numerous glitches every time a new update happens. Eventually it loaded by itself when I wasn't looking. Turned off computer one night over a week ago, Got up next day, powered on = No post beep, No signal to monitor. Groan.

2) Changed to different monitor, no change. Tested both monitors on working system = no problems there. Both working.

3) Reset CMOS, Changed CMOS battery as it was not at full charge (tested with multimeter). Still nothing. Changed from onboard graphics card to integrated graphics and managed to get signal to monitor and thought all was well.

4) Windows 10 1709 kept pestering me to update so I let it....big mistake. Previous version 1607 was working without a problem.

5) 1709 downloaded and every single time it went to update, it got stuck at 45% and then had to roll back to 1607 when it failed. This happened several times.

6) Followed advice of others who recommended using windows update troubleshooter, then sfc /scannow, then DISM. From memory they didn't find anything in the first round of testing but the 1709 update just kept failing. At one stage however it did manage to update 1607 and noted that my system was up to date. = no 1709 trying to download.

7) Tried troubleshooter sfc /scannow and various other options again to check all was working fine. I kept getting a message that SFC found corrupt files it couldn't fix. Ran W/Update troubleshooter and it found 'Potential Windows update database error detected = not fixed.

8)Ran Chkdsk and figured I had nothing to lose, it would at least fix anything else that might be going wrong if it didn't fix this issue. Took forever. Can't recall but don't think it found any problems. Ran Malwarebytes adwcleaner and various other scans but they found nothing. Side note: Microsoft put out a bulletin saying that 1709 wouldn't load unless av manufacturers had a certain registry key to stop these latest attacks etc so I unloaded avast& every other security software I had and activated defender. Didn't make any difference. Further side note: my other two pcs downloaded 1709 without having to do any of that. Both are running AVast and there was no problem with either of those.

9) Downloaded Win 10 USB & figured I'd do an inplace update instead of trying to download it from the net. Didn't use it yet, just saved it to usb. Ran troubleshooter again and it did seem to manage to fix various things including the Windows update database error. Disconnected the internet so it couldn't download anything in between and ran the usb without update option. Just wanted to see if it would repair it...nada, nothing, zip = got to 45% and failed as usual.

10) Went out while it was restoring previous version and told flatmate to follow any prompts it gave along the way but otherwise, just let it reload etc. Alas, this time it didn't restore the previous windows version. When I got back he had written down an error code that it spat back = 0xC1900101 - 0x30018 Failed in FIRST_BOOT with error during SYSPREP operation. It seemed to have gone to sleep after that and wouldn't open back up.

11) Powered off. Turned it on again and got an error message "No boot disc has been detected or the disk has failed" = SHOOT ME NOW. I figured it was probably sotware related, not hard drive related as I'd had plenty of upgrade and boot errors prior to that. Powered off and back on again = nothing, not a post beep, no signal to monitor = back to square one when it first attempted to download 1709. I don't have any other graphics cards to test it on and for all intents, if it is this latest update, it's knocked out both graphics cards so far and corrupted everything imaginable. . Have I mentioned at this stage how much I HATE Windows 10??????????. Download Tuesday = Crash Wednesday. Funny thing is = my other two pc's downloaded it fine and are working without issue.

12) Since then, I've gone through some of the hardware diagnostic tests suggested on other threads including remove RAM and test each one in every slot = have two 8 gb ram cards. Still got nothing every time. Left both out and switched PC on, get beeping from motherboard. Good sign maybe? I need one. Have no way to test power supply. & the only way to test hard drive would be to put it in the older HP if specs match, & try to fix the boot problem, but surely that wouldn't explain why I'm getting no signal to monitor?

13) Tried resetting CMOS again= still nothing. The power comes on, fans work, but still no signal to monitor & it won't respond to F10 or let me into the bios so I can try to boot from the USB or recovery discs. Then again I wouldn't know as I have no signal to monitor. Right now, it's a brick & I'm thinking of using one on it. A brick that is. It's weird that my older pc's downloaded 1709 with no issues and this newer one just carked it.

Any ideas what I can do next other than run screaming from the room? I've tried swearing at it in a very loud voice but it just sits there silently sneering at me & refusing to budge.
 
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If I take the ram out, it still starts up, fans spin, lights etc, but it also beeps 3 times with a short break in between each beep. If ram is in I get no beeps and everything starts up, lights, fans etc, but no signal to monitor.
 
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ok, so you get power to the system with RAM installed. That's good.
Follow these steps to get a flash drive ready for flashing a BIOS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3S3KgcT-Ao

Once ready make sure that nothing is plugged into the motherboard, just the mobo, cpu, ram, cooler, PSU (you know, the basics for getting to the BIOS screen)
Then proceed with the steps for flashing the BIOS with the version you downloaded from the drivers page for you PC.
You can find it here
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-pavilion-p6-2400-desktop-pc-series/5330783/model/5337177
select Windows 8.1 and click "Change" and get it downloaded. This site will only work on Internet Explorer, Microsft Edge and I believe Chrome but not Firefox. So use the appropriate browser.

Once you've done all that let's hope you get to the BIOS. It may take up to 15min for you get to the BIOS after starting the process. If you don't get anywhere after 15min then your system is most likely done for and you can try to take it to a repair shop to see if they can do anything as they would have some tools for this stuff that you may not have.

(the following is in regards to if everything goes well with the bios flash)

If this does work however and you can get to the BIOS then proceed to go to the following link and download the Windows Media Creation Tool and make sure you have a flash drive with at least 8GB of storage capacity to use for creating a bootable flash drive then proceed to turn off your PC and plug in the HDD but not the GPU and then boot it up with the flash drive installed and boot into the flash drive and install a fresh copy of Windows.
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=691209

before installation it will ask you to select a device to install to. don't delete the drive partitions, just select the main one for the install as this will take all of the files from places like download, pictures, documents etc. and move them to the Windows.old folder located in the main directory of the C drive where you can go and retrieve them.

If everything works and you get to install Windows on the machine immediately go to windows update and check for updates. if there are updates that require a restart do so and check again repeating this process until there are no more updates. once done with that turn off the system and unplug the power cable from the PC then install the GPU and move the video cable to the corresponding port on the GPU and boot into windows then install drivers for the GPU, directx, visual c++ etc. along with games and what not and enjoy yourself.

Hope all goes well with the BIOS flash and getting your PC back in working shape.
 
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Didn't get far. I downloaded the right BIOS update and followed the instructions, it extracted into my cdrive in a folder but after that the video opens some hp bios update utility that allows it to make a usb disc but it doesn't seem to show how to get to that hp bios update utility screen. I don't know which one to click on to get that utility open. The video doesn't say anything about how to open that utility. Here's whats in the extracted folder:

Flash = Windows Batch File
JAS_820.ROM = ROM File
safuwin = Appilcation
samifldrv64.sys = System File
safu.win

I'm on an asus laptop so I'm assuming it can't hurt my bios on this pc if it gets opened accidentally Can it? Just not sure which one enables me to get to that utility to make a usb copy
 
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REad a bit further into your post....Firefox does work on that page and I found the bios versions You mentioned 8.1 but my system originally came with a Win 8 operating system. I hecked the specifications page for software that shipped with my model and confirmed it was win 8. My original bios was relevant to windows 8 version and I did take note of what it was when I was able to get into the bios. It's JAS_818.rom v 8.18 The next one is V8.20. Just gonna go check to see if the 8.1 bios versions are the same numbers. Once I figure out how to make the hp bios update assistant to open I'll keep following your instructions. Cheers and many thanks for helping me out here.
 
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I already have the flash made for updating win 10 in place. One question though...if there's no signal to the monitor and the graphics cards are not working how can it show anything on a bios screen? Also, I noticed a short while ago that when I do switch the computer on, there's a power led that comes on where the power switch is, but the small blinking light that usually shows the hdd being accessed, stays unlit. Does that mean it's not accessing the hdd? I'm still gonna try to update the bios as I have nothing to lose. Just gotta now figure out how to get that bios utility to open so I can create a usb disc.

Just checked, there is no bios update for that model on 8.1 as it did indeed come with win 8 so that's the only bios available. All good there. That video link doesn't actually say how to get to that bios utility so I'll have to do more research. Once I find out, I'll follow your advice and post the results back here. Cheers.
 
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my bad. here is the utility. (at least I think it's the utility). just get the latest one at the top of the list.
http://ftp.hp.com/pub/caps-softpaq/cmit/HP_BCU.html

Again, make sure you don't have any other storage devices plugged into the board and no GPU either. Run graphics cable from motherboard output. and have only keyboard and mouse along with flash drive plugged into IO. not even a network card or ethernet cable should be plugged in.
 
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Hi Vic, yep tried that i.e. delete, got nothing that I could actually see on screen as I think there's no graphics drivers or the integrated one is now in the 'hidden devices' (like the nvidia) and not functioning. It may well be going into the bios when I press delete or f10 but I wouldn't know as I can't see anything on the monitor.....that's the problem.

Thanks Night Owl...you're a champion but before I do that, I had a thought about trying something else first. When this first happened I got the same thing,no signal to monitor but when I switched it to the integrated graphics it worked. Nothing I did after that got the Nvidia card working again & I couldn't download new drivers for that as the system was not finding the graphics card & neither was the nvidia installer.

Others have said that this update will remove drivers it finds incompatible and I think that's exactly what it's done with both gpu's as this 'no signal to monitor' issue is exactly where this whole dilemma started.

the second last error message I got when the Win 10 update failed to roll back was:

"Code 0xC1900101 - 0x3000D
Cause Installation failed during the FIRST_BOOT phase while attempting the MIGRATE_DATA operation. This can occur due to a problem with a display driver."

So, perhaps I can safely assume that the display driver for the integrated gpu (just like the nvidia) has been deleted somehow. One of the guys on the HP forum suggested I put this hard drive into my other hp, somehow fix the corrupt files with a fresh copy of win 10 OS, and then put it back into the other one. Of course that's when the integrated graphics card was working. Not sure I want to screw up my working pc so didn't want to physically connect it to that one internally. Then I recalled a mate of mine had a hdd dock and used to reuse his old hd's and those he'd salvaged files from for friends. So it got me thinking...if I buy a hdd adapter (cheaper than a dock), I could power this hdd from the old computer psu and plug into the other computer via usb. That way I could at least access it and test if it's working. If I get nothing then the answer is simple. Its dead.

As for fixing the corrupt copy of windows, I'm still scratching my head over that one. Am posting on the HP forum as well to ask him how I might go about that? I watched a whole lot of youtube vids last night about cloning from one hdd to the other including OS, so it seems it might be possible to clone the OS only.

I kept thinking that if it has no graphics drivers anyway, I'd still have to find a way to load those as without them, I'm flying blind no matter what I do. But maybe if I can fix the corrupted boot and os, it might find the integrated graphics card and download the driver when Win 10 attempts to update. What say all of you? Is it pipe dreaming or does it have possibilities.
 
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OK, so I rang a local techie and filled him in on all of this and he reckons he's seen system after system with issues related to win 10 updates including no signal to monitor & missing graphics drivers. He figured it was curious that I was getting an error message about graphics drivers just before the whole thing went to hell. He's happy to do some testing while I'm over there just to see if the hdd, motherboard, psu, nvidia gpu etc is working and once all of that is verified, he can reload the os if that's what it's down to and see if that fixes it. If that's the case, I'll post the outcome here. He might also be able to update the bios while he's at it as it may very well be that the new bios update is needed to run Win 10 properly on this pc. If I were able to get some kind of response from it in terms of signal to monitor I might have a hope of doing something but without a screen I'm swimming blind in a croc infested swamp. He's at least got a test rig and various ways to rule out hardware aspects. Will let you know what he finds later this afternoon.
 
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Hi All,well I'm no closer to the solution suffice to say that the techie suspects the mobo, but couldn't really confirm it as people were coming in an out of his shop and he got too distracted. He knows however, that I'll keep trying to figure it out, so he suggested either mobo or psu. That said, I came home and started fiddling about again (scratching head & willing it to start...lol) and noticed along the way that there was no green light showing on my mobo. hmmmmm!!!. Went and did some research and went through the checklist I found on this site and watched a corsair video on psu testing but had a couple of questions.

Firstly, it scares the crap out of me to put a paperclick into a plug and turn power on....visions of Frankenstein but I'll give anything a go and run like hell. I noticed however, that in his test he uses the fans to deduce that the psu is working. My fans spin without doing that, so could I suspect that the power supply is working? I read elsewhere that if the fans spin, it doesn't necessarily mean that the psu isn't faulty or successfully sending power to the cpu on the mobo. So....I checked the 4 pin cpu power plug (as per checklist) and made sure it was plugged in properly and it was, but still no green light. How should I proceed? What is that paperclip test supposed to do if the fans are the only things he's using to decide the psu is working? i.e. if fans are spinning already, without doing all that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWXgQSokF4&feature=youtube_gdata

So far:
1) Fans Spin and mobo sends me a beep code if I remove the ram, so there's life in the old girl yet. I hear two zip zip sounds as it powers up as if it's trying to access something = hdd maybe?
2) No green light on mobo
3) Still no signal to monitor
4) Techie took a look at hdd and showed me a couple of entries that said something like File Found 000 and File found 001 or something similar to that. He reckoned that the HDD could be failing or at least it's showing errors. Said it might last 5 years or five minutes but that it was probably unreliable. As above, he didn't have the time to check thoroughly as he was doing me a favour, so paying customers had to take priority of course.

I've managed to locate another Jasmine ms-7778 motherboard out of china just in case & at least it's new, but wow, what a hassle and expense if it isn't that. Thought I"d check into the psu a bit further first because at least I know there has to be a problem with power going to cpu = no green light. It seemed to me that if fans are spinning and error code sounding without ram, the mobo may not be completely cactus.

Seems like the whole thing went awry at the same time...i.e. win 10 download failed and then all hell broke loose. I'm thinking maybe the hdd may have been the culprit for the download failing, As I've said, I'm just a novice learning as I go, so am just thinking systematically and trying to check if what I'm seeing is what I'm supposed to see. If nothing else, I'm learning a lot. Fixed my own laptop recently so feeling as though I can tackle this if I don't throw it on the floor first...lol

BTW, O.H. just asked if there's any way to test power supply with multi meter including the cpu plug?? For that matter is there any way to test the mobo with MM? Sorry if these seem like naive questions, but have to start somewhere or I won't learn anything in return for all this frustration. If I learn something then it wasn't a complete waste. Only paid $270 for the pc second hand and the specs are excellent = quad core, 3tb hdd, a10 amd etc. Much better than my old hp but it's still working like a trojan & this one ain't. ho hum. Bottom line if it costs too much to repair, I may be better off just investing in another 2nd hand one & selling any working parts off the faulty one to fund it.
 
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OK, one question answered via google sage: BTW, this site (below link) has an amazing amount of info on how to troubleshoot pc issues:

PSU Manual testing tutorial link:
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-manually-test-a-power-supply-with-a-multimeter-2626158
https://www.lifewire.com/atx-24-pin-12v-power-supply-pinout-2624578

This tutorial goes through manual testing but it leaves one questions unanswered i.e. in step five he says to
"Short out pins 15 and 16 on the 24-pin motherboard power connector with a small piece of wire" e.g. green and black, & then goes on to describe manual testing with MM. Am I safe in assuming that you do the test with the green and black wires still shorted? I won't even contemplate doing anything like this unless I know exactly what I"m supposed to be doing. I notice that he also recommends that you can get a psu tester, which seems safer, faster and easier. e.g. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/KQ-PC-Computer-20-24-Pin-PSU-ATX-SATA-HD-Power-Supply-Tester-High-Quality-Welco/372171072974?epid=1338157906&hash=item56a71fe5ce:g:6kwAAOSwhsBaNMeb

I may consider buying one of these testers if they're reliable = seems like a good piece of kit for any pc tool box given how unreliable psu's can actually be. Also seems safer.

 
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Buy a decent psu and unreliable psu's will no longer be a thought
The paperclip is safe to do. don't hold it when powered though. the clip must touch the copper inside firmly, only power on powerpoint after the clip is fitted and make sure a dvd or hdd or something is connected to that psu as well. they need something to draw power or it won't be happy at all
 
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Is the issue not that the MSI motherboard is simply totally incompatible with Windows 10 ver 1709? Somehow this has led to the crash of the graphics cards? MSI needs to chime in and offer some advice and/or issue updated BIOS for their older motherboards!

This comment is based on the fact that my MSI MS-7522 v 3.1 [ X58 Pro-E] motherboard seems unable to upgrade to Windows 10 ver 1709 either via the Internet or from a ISO file. The constant attempts at downloading the upgrades is consuming all my limited ADSL bandwidth and making use of the machine all but impossible on the internet. I contacted MS today and they got into my machine and advised me that I needed to upgrade the BIOS. The BIOS is version 8.14 (2010) while the latest on their website is version 8.15 (2011) so I am not very hopeful.
 
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