[SOLVED] Can’t get in Windows 10

[TonyH88]

After opening an apparent corrupt .avi file (not downloaded, I got it from a company that digitalized an old Hi8 tape), my laptop started to get stuck and I had to turn it off. Now when I turn it on it goes as usual till here, but when I press any button it stays stuck in this blurry stage for a min or so before going back again.

I went to troubleshoot by pressing ALT+F10. System restore won’t work, it gives me an error and tells me to try it again. There is unfortunately only one restoration point to try from.

I can’t seem to find a way to get into safe mode. Went into BIOS, but it’s not there. Also not from the advanced startup settings. But I might have missed something here. I tried all short keys that I used to use on my old PC back in the day, but it always goes to the login screen. Also the SHIFT restarting doesn’t work.

What should I try?

Laptop:
Acer A715-71G-74QK

 

[Math Geek]

have you tried the start-up repair from an install disk?

that's the next thing i'd try to see if it will get you booted up.

i can't think of anything that a simple avi file could mess up unless it had some malware in it.

 

[TonyH88]

have you tried the start-up repair from an install disk?

that's the next thing i'd try to see if it will get you booted up.

i can't think of anything that a simple avi file could mess up unless it had some malware in it.

I don’t have a disc reader. Would I need to get a start-up repair on a USB stick and boot it? Or could I access it without any of those (I don’t own any USB stick, but could buy it)?

I should’ve added a bit more info. The avi file used to work just fine, but since a while it will only play the first few seconds and and then stop. Today I tried it again. First in VLC, but it didn’t play (or recognize) more than the first few seconds. Then I opened it in PowerDVD. There it recognized the whole length, but still only played the first few seconds before turning black. I skipped ahead where it showed a still image, but then PowerDVD prompted that I needed to update the software to be able to play the content. From there on it didn’t work anymore. Eventually I restarted my laptop.

 

[Math Geek]

yah you'll have to boot from a usb drive. you'll have to make it on another machine using the media creator from microsoft. it does it automatically.

 

[TonyH88]

yah you'll have to boot from a usb drive. you'll have to make it on another machine using the media creator from microsoft. it does it automatically.

Alright, cheers. Hopefully I can manage that on Monday. I’ll post here if it worked

 

[Math Geek]

yup if it does not work, then please come back. this is only the next step to try and not the final option.

 

[TonyH88]

yup if it does not work, then please come back. this is only the next step to try and not the final option.

Is the startup repair option from the restore windows (ALT+F10) the same as what you suggested? Because if so, I get this message.

 

[TonyH88]

Also, I tried the ‘reset this pc’ option opting to keep my files. I got the message “There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made.”

edit:
Also did sfc /scannow and got this.

 

[Math Geek]

it is similar with the difference being where it is looking for files to repair with. your file system is messed up somehow and it won't be able to get to what it needs for it to work.

try it booting from an install usb so that it has clean files to work with. might make the difference, though it may not. i'm not 100% sure what's going on and i am thinking about it a bit more. since reset and restore is not working, a lot of options are off the table.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Also did sfc /scannow and got this.

I see, you can get into recovery environment.
Then you just have to locate your problematic avi file and delete it.

 

[TonyH88]

it is similar with the difference being where it is looking for files to repair with. your file system is messed up somehow and it won't be able to get to what it needs for it to work.

try it booting from an install usb so that it has clean files to work with. might make the difference, though it may not. i'm not 100% sure what's going on and i am thinking about it a bit more. since reset and restore is not working, a lot of options are off the table.

Alright, cheers. I’ll be home tomorrow and will try it with a usb stick. I’ll let you know!

 

[TonyH88]

I see, you can get into recovery environment.
Then you just have to locate your problematic avi file and delete it.

Tried to delete the files (aparently it’s an MP4) in command, but got the message, “The media is write protected” back. So I checked it and got the following back. Not sure what the difference is between ‘Current Read-only State’ and ‘Read-only

I used two commands: ‘del’ to try and delete the file and after that ‘rmdir’ to delete the whole folder the file is in.

 

[TonyH88]

yup if it does not work, then please come back. this is only the next step to try and not the final option.

Got home a bit early, so I decided to do it immediately. Unfortunately it didn’t work. I got the same error, with one difference: it says the log file was saved to D:\Windows instead of C:\Windows.

edit:
In command is can see my c and d drive have been switched, but only if I boot from usb.

 

[Math Geek]

the drive letters moving around are not that big of a deal really. if you dual boot multiple OS's then the c: drive swaps to the OS running at the time and so on. so that's not really a problem.

i think the avi file was not the problem but rather the straw that broke your file system. it was already on the edge and loading that file was the final thing. i am not really sure what is going on as not seen this particular issue before.

can you get to files on the other drives? at this point i am thinking could be the hard drive itself failed. if you can access the smaller drive and it's files through the command prompt, this would back that theory up a bit.

 

[punkncat]

This all reads like a storage drive going bad.

 

[TonyH88]

the drive letters moving around are not that big of a deal really. if you dual boot multiple OS's then the c: drive swaps to the OS running at the time and so on. so that's not really a problem.

i think the avi file was not the problem but rather the straw that broke your file system. it was already on the edge and loading that file was the final thing. i am not really sure what is going on as not seen this particular issue before.

can you get to files on the other drives? at this point i am thinking could be the hard drive itself failed. if you can access the smaller drive and it's files through the command prompt, this would back that theory up a bit.

Alright, I understand. Thanks for explaining.

It’s weird, because my main drive (the smaller sized SSD) never caused me any problems. The laptop worked perfectly fine. The second drive (the 1tb HDD) always was bit faulty. I mostly notice it when playing games installed on that drive, because they will pause for one or two seconds every two minute or so. I also see it the same frequency interruptions with file transfers.

What do you mean exactly with getting to files on other drives? I went on command and I can enter both drives. On my HDD I can move and and delete files, but on my SSD I cannot. It says it’s write protected.
Since Windows is installed on my SSD, it probably doesn’t even matter if the HDD works or not. In this case the error should be in the SSD.

 

[TonyH88]

This all reads like a storage drive going bad.

If you don't have important data on the C drive, try reinstalling the system. These symptoms are similar to a damaged disk.

I have quite some important documents and a lot of pictures I stored on my C drive, though most things are either on my D drive or backed up in cloud. I try to use the C drive mostly for applications.
I would move them through command, but my C drive is write protected for some reason.

 

[TonyH88]

I ran chkdsk on both drives. The letters are switched, because I’m booting from USB, so my main drive now the D and my secondary is the C.

SSD (main)
HDD (secondary)

 

[SkyNetRising]

You have to run chkdsk with /f switch. Without it chkdsk runs in read only mode and nothing gets fixed.

chkdsk c: /f​

chkdsk d: /f​

 

[TonyH88]

You have to run chkdsk with /f switch. Without it chkdsk runs in read only mode and nothing gets fixed.

chkdsk c: /f​

chkdsk d: /f​

I’m already doing that, I read about it afterwards. It doesn’t work on my main drive, neither /r or /f. It does work on my secondary one and it’s busy now, but barely moving at stage 4.

edit:
I was running chkdsk /r, stopped it and switched to /f. These are the screens (keep in mind that d is my main drive now):
Part 1
Part 2

 

[Math Geek]

we can only reach the conclusion that the drive is messed up and needs to be replaced. if you can go back to the command line and copy anything you need from the ssd to the other drive and then you can try a reinstall of windows, but i don't think it is going to work.

looks like the drive is just dead. these are the same symptoms i see with other flash memory devices when they fail.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Corrupted file system doesn't mean the hardware is bad.
You can easy get the FS corruption with BSOD or even by pushing reset button in a wrong moment.

To conclude bad HDD/SSD, you have to diagnose it properly first. None of that has been done here.

 

[TonyH88]

we can only reach the conclusion that the drive is messed up and needs to be replaced. if you can go back to the command line and copy anything you need from the ssd to the other drive and then you can try a reinstall of windows, but i don't think it is going to work.

looks like the drive is just dead. these are the same symptoms i see with other flash memory devices when they fail.

I unfortunately can’t copy anything from my SSD, because it says the media is write-protected. I tried to take it away through diskpart > attributes disk clear readonly, but that also doesn’t work. Not sure what else I can do. I would want to try a clean instal before saving my things

 

[Math Geek]

it's the "write protected" error that points me in that direction. that's the same thing you get when flash memory devices go bad. i've seen it often on thumb drives and sd cards, but only a couple times on an ssd.

but the symptoms are the same on all the devices. the fresh install attempt will be a good test since it won't get very far at all if the drive can not be written to which it looks like it can't be.

 

[TonyH88]

Corrupted file system doesn't mean the hardware is bad.
You can easy get the FS corruption with BSOD or even by pushing reset button in a wrong moment.

To conclude bad HDD/SSD, you have to diagnose it properly first. None of that has been done here.

Is there anything you can suggest me to do?