This is really complicated so I would very much appreciate it if you read the whole thing, you kinda need to. It's a long one but it's important that you know everything. Thanks.
Okay, some background. I was watching videos on my PC and after finishing, I went to put my PC into sleep mode. On my PC, I do this by tapping the power button since I have it configured to go to sleep mode when pressed. Usually it works pretty fine, but this time everything BUT the PC shut off. The lights and fans were still on while the screen was black. I thought it might just need a while this time so I left it alone for about an hour and a half to go do something else. I come back and it's STILL yet to do it, so I felt like my only choice was to power it down completely (by holding the power button this time).
I thought nothing of it, but when I turned my PC on again, it went straight to a blue screen. The blue screen has the error listed in the title, winload.efi is missing or corrupt + 0xc000000D. It had these options: retry (did nothing), boot into recovery (just booted back to the same blue screen), and boot to UEFI BIOS (which is the only thing that works). I must have restarted this thing like 20 times, it absolutely WILL NOT boot. So, I panicked and went into BIOS to see if restoring it to optimized default settings would do anything. Nope. I also tried booting into safe mode but that just sent it straight back to the BSOD.
So, in researching I found there could be any one of three culprits:
1. RAM - I began researching both the errors I got (and to clarify I got them both at the same time on the same BSOD). It seems in both cases there are instances where the RAM is the problem. I've noticed a bit more recently that since this BSOD crap has happened my PC beeps twice when booting, so I researched that and in many cases that's also indicative of bad RAM of some kind, but when I have an ASUS motherboard and also read that 2 beeps could just mean the BIOS is working correctly, although I've never heard them until this problem happened. So, it could be or it couldn't be. Not really clear.
2. My HDD - This is where it got really annoying. So I used my windows disk to see if I could repair anything (I was able to boot to it successfully many times) and I tried the following:
Doing Startup Repair - Ran for 10 seconds then said it failed, and the log was empty
System Restore - It gave some error about not being able to see the drive or restore points or something like that, I don't remember this one too well but point is it failed.
Trying to fix it from Command Prompt - I tried the various BOOTREC commands like fixboot and fixmbr but they didn't do anything since the command prompt was acting like my C: drive didn't exist. For instance, when I tried to do the scanos command it said something along the lines of "Windows installations found: 0". I also tried to rebuild the BCD but I couldn't because it wasn't picking up my drive.
Reinstalling Windows - I even tried to just see if I could install Windows again, but of course nothing is that simple. When I tried to it skipped straight to a point where it asked me if I wanted to upgrade my installation and retain my files or do a custom installation and wipe everything. I'm not willing to do the second option (yet) so I tried doing the first but it gave me an error basically saying that I can't.
The only option I haven't tried yet is trying to restore from image. Now, thankfully, I was insanely lucky as literally just the day prior to this happening my external HDD did an automatic full-scale image backup. The reason I was hesistant to try the option is because I feared that my external HDD could be messed up in some way as well, so in the mean time (at the time of this post) I'm backing the image file from external HDD to another HDD, just in case something happens to the image on the external.
3. Intel Optane - Now this is important. After a while I got to thinking. Intel Optane basically deals with both memory and HDD stuff, and the errors I've gotten are known to be related to both of those things sometimes, so I thought maybe if I completely disable Intel Optane from the BIOS it could possibly fix anything. To put it short, it didn't really fix anything but now some things are different. With Intel Optane disabled, I'm no longer getting a blue screen but instead booting to just a black screen. I tried to boot into safe mode again but it just went to black again. So I restarted it for about the 100th time and went to my BIOS because now I have to boot to my recovery disk straight from there.
I went through all the same recovery fixing attempts again, like Startup Repair, and everything failed again except in the instance of the command prompt. I went in there and tried to see if I could explore my C: drive but it told me it was either unreadable or corrupted (before disabline Optane it wouldn't even find it). I then did some DISKPART stuff to see if it also picked up my drive, and it did, as opposed to last time. It even listed it as "Healthy" when I looked at volumes. So after that I did the BOOTREC stuff again. Surprisingly, both fixmbr and fixboot completed successfully, but unfortunately doing scanos and rebuildbcd both yieled the same "drive is unreadable or corrupted" error. After that I closed the command prompt and then shut down the PC from the recovery menu to see if the fixmbr or fixboot things had done anything, and then something strange happened. My PC did the very same thing that started all this and got stuck attempting to shut down with a black screen. I gave it about 40 minutes but I knew I would have to power it off again so I did, and it doesn't seem to have done any further damage from what I can tell.
So after that is when I decided to backup my HDD image from the external to another one, since it looked like I was out of options. In researching a little more though I found this program called Rufus that lets you make a USB recovery tool from a Windows iso. I noticed that this program in particular lets you select between MBR and GPT. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe really big HDDs (like my 8TB HDD) HAVE to use GPT. So I thought maybe that was the reason I was having troubles in recovery earlier and I'll just configure it like that and see if anything changes.
So. I go to boot my new recovery USB from my BIOS and it boots, albeit VERY slowly. I noticed that on the USB it is very very much slower than when I was doing it from the recovery CD, like it took 2 minutes to even properly load the recovery thing. But anyways, upon getting back into the recovery menu I noticed there were some new options, one of which said I could go back to a previous update of Windows. I didn't wanna try anything complex just yet so I just went to the same Startup Repair to see if it would do something.
And now.. instead of going "diagnosing problem" and then quitting after 5 seconds, it actually seems to be attempting to fix it. It says "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete."
As of right now this is still going, it's been going for about an hour I think, but I'm not really confident it'll actually fix everything. Granted, if it doesn't I can try the CMD stuff and Windows install again, but I'm taking it one step at a time. But yeah, this is why I made this thread and typed out this ludicrous amount of info for. If this thing doesn't work (and going by my luck it probably won't), I need to know if you guys have ANY idea or opinions on any of this, and any possible further solutions other than the last few ones I've planned out here. Any help will be GREATLY appreciated, this has been extremely stressful for me.
Thanks, and take care.
Some additional information:
I was unable to do a minidump earlier but I could try again when possible.
My specs are as follows:
GPU: GTX 1080Ti
CPU: i7 8700
HDD; A Seagate 8TB HDD
RAM: 32GB
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-E GAMING
PSU: Corsair 850w
Okay, some background. I was watching videos on my PC and after finishing, I went to put my PC into sleep mode. On my PC, I do this by tapping the power button since I have it configured to go to sleep mode when pressed. Usually it works pretty fine, but this time everything BUT the PC shut off. The lights and fans were still on while the screen was black. I thought it might just need a while this time so I left it alone for about an hour and a half to go do something else. I come back and it's STILL yet to do it, so I felt like my only choice was to power it down completely (by holding the power button this time).
I thought nothing of it, but when I turned my PC on again, it went straight to a blue screen. The blue screen has the error listed in the title, winload.efi is missing or corrupt + 0xc000000D. It had these options: retry (did nothing), boot into recovery (just booted back to the same blue screen), and boot to UEFI BIOS (which is the only thing that works). I must have restarted this thing like 20 times, it absolutely WILL NOT boot. So, I panicked and went into BIOS to see if restoring it to optimized default settings would do anything. Nope. I also tried booting into safe mode but that just sent it straight back to the BSOD.
So, in researching I found there could be any one of three culprits:
- RAM (32gb)
- My HDD (8tb Seagate)
- Intel Optane
1. RAM - I began researching both the errors I got (and to clarify I got them both at the same time on the same BSOD). It seems in both cases there are instances where the RAM is the problem. I've noticed a bit more recently that since this BSOD crap has happened my PC beeps twice when booting, so I researched that and in many cases that's also indicative of bad RAM of some kind, but when I have an ASUS motherboard and also read that 2 beeps could just mean the BIOS is working correctly, although I've never heard them until this problem happened. So, it could be or it couldn't be. Not really clear.
2. My HDD - This is where it got really annoying. So I used my windows disk to see if I could repair anything (I was able to boot to it successfully many times) and I tried the following:
Doing Startup Repair - Ran for 10 seconds then said it failed, and the log was empty
System Restore - It gave some error about not being able to see the drive or restore points or something like that, I don't remember this one too well but point is it failed.
Trying to fix it from Command Prompt - I tried the various BOOTREC commands like fixboot and fixmbr but they didn't do anything since the command prompt was acting like my C: drive didn't exist. For instance, when I tried to do the scanos command it said something along the lines of "Windows installations found: 0". I also tried to rebuild the BCD but I couldn't because it wasn't picking up my drive.
Reinstalling Windows - I even tried to just see if I could install Windows again, but of course nothing is that simple. When I tried to it skipped straight to a point where it asked me if I wanted to upgrade my installation and retain my files or do a custom installation and wipe everything. I'm not willing to do the second option (yet) so I tried doing the first but it gave me an error basically saying that I can't.
The only option I haven't tried yet is trying to restore from image. Now, thankfully, I was insanely lucky as literally just the day prior to this happening my external HDD did an automatic full-scale image backup. The reason I was hesistant to try the option is because I feared that my external HDD could be messed up in some way as well, so in the mean time (at the time of this post) I'm backing the image file from external HDD to another HDD, just in case something happens to the image on the external.
3. Intel Optane - Now this is important. After a while I got to thinking. Intel Optane basically deals with both memory and HDD stuff, and the errors I've gotten are known to be related to both of those things sometimes, so I thought maybe if I completely disable Intel Optane from the BIOS it could possibly fix anything. To put it short, it didn't really fix anything but now some things are different. With Intel Optane disabled, I'm no longer getting a blue screen but instead booting to just a black screen. I tried to boot into safe mode again but it just went to black again. So I restarted it for about the 100th time and went to my BIOS because now I have to boot to my recovery disk straight from there.
I went through all the same recovery fixing attempts again, like Startup Repair, and everything failed again except in the instance of the command prompt. I went in there and tried to see if I could explore my C: drive but it told me it was either unreadable or corrupted (before disabline Optane it wouldn't even find it). I then did some DISKPART stuff to see if it also picked up my drive, and it did, as opposed to last time. It even listed it as "Healthy" when I looked at volumes. So after that I did the BOOTREC stuff again. Surprisingly, both fixmbr and fixboot completed successfully, but unfortunately doing scanos and rebuildbcd both yieled the same "drive is unreadable or corrupted" error. After that I closed the command prompt and then shut down the PC from the recovery menu to see if the fixmbr or fixboot things had done anything, and then something strange happened. My PC did the very same thing that started all this and got stuck attempting to shut down with a black screen. I gave it about 40 minutes but I knew I would have to power it off again so I did, and it doesn't seem to have done any further damage from what I can tell.
So after that is when I decided to backup my HDD image from the external to another one, since it looked like I was out of options. In researching a little more though I found this program called Rufus that lets you make a USB recovery tool from a Windows iso. I noticed that this program in particular lets you select between MBR and GPT. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe really big HDDs (like my 8TB HDD) HAVE to use GPT. So I thought maybe that was the reason I was having troubles in recovery earlier and I'll just configure it like that and see if anything changes.
So. I go to boot my new recovery USB from my BIOS and it boots, albeit VERY slowly. I noticed that on the USB it is very very much slower than when I was doing it from the recovery CD, like it took 2 minutes to even properly load the recovery thing. But anyways, upon getting back into the recovery menu I noticed there were some new options, one of which said I could go back to a previous update of Windows. I didn't wanna try anything complex just yet so I just went to the same Startup Repair to see if it would do something.
And now.. instead of going "diagnosing problem" and then quitting after 5 seconds, it actually seems to be attempting to fix it. It says "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete."
As of right now this is still going, it's been going for about an hour I think, but I'm not really confident it'll actually fix everything. Granted, if it doesn't I can try the CMD stuff and Windows install again, but I'm taking it one step at a time. But yeah, this is why I made this thread and typed out this ludicrous amount of info for. If this thing doesn't work (and going by my luck it probably won't), I need to know if you guys have ANY idea or opinions on any of this, and any possible further solutions other than the last few ones I've planned out here. Any help will be GREATLY appreciated, this has been extremely stressful for me.
Thanks, and take care.
Some additional information:
I was unable to do a minidump earlier but I could try again when possible.
My specs are as follows:
GPU: GTX 1080Ti
CPU: i7 8700
HDD; A Seagate 8TB HDD
RAM: 32GB
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-E GAMING
PSU: Corsair 850w
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