[SOLVED] Windows 10 Occasional Boot Failure

[sillyajay]

[For the solution, see my post on 12/19/2016]

I'm using a Lenovo G510 laptop with 2 drives: an SSD and a HDD. The OS is on the SSD.
Specs:
SSD: SanDisk SSD Plus 120GB
HDD: Seagate st500lt012 (500 GB)
CPU: Intel i5 4200m
RAM: (4 GB x 2)

I can sometimes boot into windows 10 anniversary edition, but other times, the dots spin infinitely, and Windows never boots. Other times, I see the automatic repair text appear and then disappear. Still other times, the automatic repair text appears, and then it says that Windows Diagnostics is running (I cant really remember the exact text). Still, nothing comes of it and I am unable to boot. The reason why I titled it "occasional boot failure" is because restarting and trying to boot 30+ times ends up with the computer actually booting properly once. I don't know what changes or why or how it works, but it somehow does and I don't question it.

My SSD is 6 months old, and the HDD is 3 years old. Most diagnostics say the HDD is in good health too, but there are apparently some questionable statistics about it. (I did not perform these checks, but I was told that the drive looked mostly fine, but that it could have gone bad.) I ran CrystalDiskInfo, and every SMART value came up as good.

I've reinstalled Windows, doing it perfectly. Nothing my SSD was connected, using Windows Media Creation Tool via USB. I reformatted the SSD and did a clean reinstall. I then backed up the files on the HDD, and reformated that too, and then put the files back on it. I'm now on windows build 1607, version 14393.447.

I also occasionally have seen file explorer hang and stop responding when trying to access files on my HDD. I don't know why this happens, but it may be related.

Also, IDK why both my drives show up in the bios as "Legacy" instead of "UEFI". Theyre both connected via SATA ports. My HDD is actually in an optical disk caddy, and so it uses the optical disk SATA interface. (This is probably not the problem, as I've used this setup on Windows 8.1 since March and I've never had this problem before. I upgraded to Windows 10 in September-ish and I dont believe I had this problem then. I reinstalled Windows 10 since then, so it's probably not causing my problem.)

As long as my laptop is on, it works pretty much perfectly (except for that file explorer on occasion stops working).

Checkdisk doesnt say anything is wrong. It took ~2 hours to run this on a 500 GB HDD connected via USB. Idk if this is an indication of anything.

I am able to boot into Ubuntu live edition consistently and without any error. This points to it not being a hardware issue (unless the my drives are actually messed up and SMART is lying to me.)

If anyone is able to help me with a genuine solution, please help me. I'm really desperate.
Obviously, reinstalling windows or refreshing windows will not help. Do not suggest this. My last windows reinstallation of windows was literally 30 hours ago (11/16/2016).

 

[Colif]

Download Seatools for windows: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/seatools/ << it will tell you how hdd is

Well, your manual is no help: https://www.lenovo.com/shop/americas/content/user_guides/g410_g510_ug_en.pdf

Welcome to Lenovo Community Forums!

Boot again inside BIOS
Try setting these

Under Exit TAB
OS Optimization or OS Optimized Should be set as Disabled or Other OS

Under Boot Tab / Start up Tab
Boot Mode Should be set to Legacy
Boot Priority Should be set to Legacy First
UEFI Boot should be set to Disabled
Quick Boot Should be Disabled
Secure boot Should be Disabled

Now press F10 to save everything and Exit
Computer will Restart now inster your CD / DVD Disc in and Turn Off the Computer.

Now on OFF state
Turn it back on and Start tapping F12
This will give you a boot selection with your DVD / CD as an option to boot from.

Hope this helps
Cheers!

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-B-and-G-Series-Notebooks/Lenovo-G510-i5-Problems-with-booting-Windows-8-1-from-media-disk/td-p/1521084

that is how to boot off DVD but win 10 should have recognised the UEFI and swapped the boot method to UEFI on install - that is what it did to me - so not sure why yours is still set that way.

 

[sillyajay]

@Colif

Thanks for the reply. I have downloaded the Seagate tool you linked. As I mentioned in my post, both my drives pass SMART tests. There appears to be nothing wrong with either of them.

As to the post you linked, my BIOS is set exactly as specified, as I don't even have anything listed under UEFI drives. (I don't know why this is.)

The problem isn't that I can't boot into an external drive (remember that Ubuntu Live on a flash drive works 100% of the time), but that I cant boot into Windows on my SSD installed in the computer, even if I select to boot from it in the BIOS.

I found a problem similar to mine, and so I tried the solution. (It's Vijay B's long post here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-windows_install/total-identified-windows-installations-0/52359f87-de4a-41dc-b0c3-cc275e1d9fbf )

I rebuilt the BCD, and everything. However, when I booted into CMD, opened DISKPART in CMD and ran "list partition", I noticed that strangely, the C: drive was assigned to the recovery partition of my SSD, the D: to my HDD, and the E: to the remaining 110 GB of my SSD. When I ran CMD as an administrator (after having booted windows, the recovery drive was no longer listed, and instead my C: was assigned to the 110 GB partition of my SSD (even though this was previously assigned to be my E. Is this a possible source of my problems?

 

[sillyajay]

After much debugging I found that the problem lies either in my HDD caddy or in my HDD itself. Further troubleshooting is required to figure out which exactly is causing my problem.

I discovered this out of pure frustration. Ripping the HDD caddy out of the laptop immediately solved all of my booting issues. Putting it back in led to eventual system instability and general problems.

 

[Colif]

if drive worked fine in smart tests, its likely the caddy is to blame as it could be the connectors on it causing problem, I don't know much about them, i assume it doesn't have software and all it does is make drive match the slot size?

 

[sillyajay]

Hi Colif,

I opened up another laptop with a working 150 GB HDD and put that inside my caddy and I'm using that now. I'm not actually accessing or using the HDD to store data, but I'm just waiting for it to fail. If it fails, then the problem is with my caddy, as I am sure that this 150 GB HDD is defect free.

If I do not see a failure, then the problem must surely lie with my current 500 GB HDD. This is the one that was installed when I was experiencing problems. Only time can tell which was causing my problems.

BTW, do you have any experience with RMA'ing an OEM product part? I highly suspect that my 500 GB HDD that originally came with my laptop is the root cause of the problem. I have already backed up all personal data and photos, so I have nothing much to lose.

 

[Colif]

I cannot see anything there about rma'ing the hdd, you may need to Go here and contact lenova direct.

Go here for warranty info as it might be there instead.

At least ssd works without hdd so thats a bonus.

did you end up running seatools on the 500gb hdd at all?

 

[sillyajay]

Yeah, I did run seatools.

One of the longer, thorough tests, just hung, so I quit that, but the shorter tests said that everything was fine.

I then also ran a 4 hour long lenovo test that I booted into via USB. That passed, but I'm not sure if it checked only my ssd or the ssd and the hdd both. The test data was unclear. I'll try that again tonight maybe.

To test if its the caddy at fault, I will just restart 5 - 10 times. That should be ample opportunity for error in case it really is the caddy that is causing my errors.

 

[sillyajay]

Ok guys. I found a half-solution.

To recap, my SSD was in the original drive bay. The HDD was in the caddy that fit into the space where my DVD reader was. The DVD reader uses some weird SATA-type interface. This is what makes the caddy possible.

My computer would detect both drives in the BIOS. However, proceeding to the boot would result in the spinning dots that never ended. Removing the HDD solved this problem, as the computer would boot fine.

Connecting the caddy+HDD to my computer via USB always worked. This enabled me to run various tests on my computer to see what was wrong. None of them reported anything wrong with the caddy+HDD combo. All tests passed.

I don't quite know why I never considered the laptop DVD SATA to be at at fault. Obviously since the USB+caddy worked and the caddy by itself did NOT work, the caddy and HDD must have been fine. To test this out further, I put back my original DVD drive into my laptop and tried to boot. Nada. I checked the BIOS to see if the motherboard had detected the drive at all. (I don't remember if it did.)

To get the computer to detect the DVD drive, I had to connect it with the same USB that I used with the caddy. This let me insert a random DVD, and it took some drivers to get the DVD reader to work. I put it back inside the laptop, sans USB adapter, and it did not work.

Now I figured it MUST be the port in the laptop that was broken. Long story short, I removed the keyboard of my laptop (which is already a pain in the ass) before realizing I had a crapton more to remove to access the port. I gave up and re-assembled my laptop.

For reasons unknown to me, when I placed the DVD drive back inside the laptop, it worked properly. I shut down the computer and tried it again. Worked again. (Recall that before it would get stuck in the spinning dots animation and never turn on.)

I put in my HDD caddy. It too booted up properly. Huh. Well I guess thats it then!

I'm still not quite sure what exactly happened to fix the problem, but it's been fixed for around 2 weeks now, with no problems since. It may have been the rough handling during the disassembly that knocked something back into place!