Super weird BIOS problem

[sedateeddie]

So I was happily browsing the internet and I turned away to fiddle with my Raspberry Pi, turned back, and my screen was black. PC was still running, panicked that my graphics card had bricked, hard reset the PC, hoped it would work....

PC didn't load windows, went to the recovery thingy, couldn't repair Windows so I went into the BIOS praying my new SSD hadn't caught fire and shagged my grandmother. SSD was there showing itself, happy as larry, checked the boot order. WTF.

There were about 20 windows bootmanager options (none tied to a USB, SSD, HDD or DVD) before my Windows SSD, I simply changed the boot order in the BIOS and set my SSD to no.1 and everything is working fine now.

How in the space of 30 seconds or so did my PC crash and massacre my BIOS boot order?

EDIT: The PC does not seem to be running perfectly roughly 25% of the time it fails to boot and hangs at the 'press f2 to enter bios' in this case f2 and del do nothing and I can't enter bios so I hard reset the PC and it will work.

 

[clutchc]

Try to eliminate any software conflicts, registry errors, etc by running CCleaner. Do the Clean and Registry sections both. https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
I may not be a bad idea to run a FULL virus scan after updating your virus pgm. Same with malware: https://www.malwarebytes.org/

 

[sedateeddie]

Try to eliminate any software conflicts, registry errors, etc by running CCleaner. Do the Clean and Registry sections both. https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
I may not be a bad idea to run a FULL virus scan after updating your virus pgm. Same with malware: https://www.malwarebytes.org/

Hi, firstly thanks for your help. I have done as you suggested but I am still encountering the same problem, roughly 25% of the time the PC will hang at the 'press f2' screen and will then work properly when I hard reset.

 

[clutchc]

Then the next thing that comes to mind, is a bad stick of memory. Download memtest and use the .ISO file to burn a bootable CD. With a single stick of RAM in the first slot (as spec'd in your MB manual), boot to memtest and let it run for a FULL pass at least. If no errors, do the other stick(s) of memory one at a time. If even a single memory error is reported, the stick is bad.
http://www.memtest.org/

 

[sedateeddie]

Then the next thing that comes to mind, is a bad stick of memory. Download memtest and use the .ISO file to burn a bootable CD. With a single stick of RAM in the first slot (as spec'd in your MB manual), boot to memtest and let it run for a FULL pass at least. If no errors, do the other stick(s) of memory one at a time. If even a single memory error is reported, the stick is bad.
http://www.memtest.org/

I think I may have figured out what was wrong. I just decided to switch out the SATA cable to a different port and for whatever reason it seems to be running fine now.

Is there any way to definitively test if a SATA port is faulty?

Also a couple of other questions. In your opinion is a SATA problem likely to cause the symptoms I was getting? Also do you think I should still run this memtest? I might have a problem with that because my RAM is in slots 2 & 4 because I have high profile RAM and it won't fit in 1 & 3 as I have a Hyper 212 evo.

 

[clutchc]

I can't see how the different DIMM slots could affect the BIOS changes. But some boards do certain slots populated before others. Check your MB manual to see if that pertains to yours. The fan for the 212 EVO can easily be slid up a bit to accommodate tall memory. Most folks do that when the RAM sticks are too tall.

Without knowing which board you have and what the rest of your system specs are, that's about all I can say for now.