Windows won't start (blinking cursor after BIOS)

Fnecro

Distinguished
Nov 19, 2011
12
0
18,510
So yesterday I was surfing the web and my computer turned off all of a sudden. Today I try and boot it up and after the Asus BIOS the screen goes blank with the blinking cursor in the upper left. I cannot get to any Windows Vista screen. I made sure the booting device priority was set to my one HD and that did not change anything. I then booted off my Vista CD and ran a startup repair and no issues were found. I am going to assume this is a data/HD issue. I ran a memory diagnostic tool found on Vista DVD and my memory seems to be fine. The CPU seems to be acting fine as well. All my devices are read by the motherboard as far as I can tell.

Anyways, I was just seeing if there were any opinions on this matter. Worse comes to worse I can do a clean install, but I would rather not lose all my music/files.

Should I try connecting the HD to this(parents) computer to see if I can boot off the drive from this computer or would that not matter much?

I looked around on the web and could not find a definitive answer.
 

Fnecro

Distinguished
Nov 19, 2011
12
0
18,510
OK so I opened the command prompt through the boot disk and tried both

"chkdsk /f /r" in which it said "the type of file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive. Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected.""

when I typed sfc /scannow, it says "windows restore protection could not start the repair service."


How can I get rid of teh write protection?
 

suteck

Distinguished
Have you gone into bios and reset them to default or optimized settings? When you do that make sure that the hdd are set to ahci or ide - which ever one you had them set for during windows installation.
Also, during boot up when the flash screen speeds by, you might have to restart it bunches of times to find it, check to make sure that the ahci bios are installed. It does tell you - AHCI bios installed or NO AHCI bios installed. I had that happen once and had to flash bios to an updated version it get it to work. Sorry, that's if you have a fairly modern system. You didn't list anything about you system so I'm guessing in the dark.
 

Fnecro

Distinguished
Nov 19, 2011
12
0
18,510
Ok so I went to the BIOS and changed the HD fropm IDE to AHCI and now I can get to the windows loading screen. It loads for about 5 seconds then goes to a blue screen and almost instantly restarts. I cannot even see what the blue screen reads. Not sure why changing it from IDE to AHCI would do that though.

I cannot find where it tells me in the AHCI bios is installed though...


Thanks.
 

suteck

Distinguished
The screen is hard to catch. It does show up quickly, usually during the second window depending on your bios manufacturer, AMI or whatever. You will have to do it often to find it and when you do you'll know. Change it back to ide and try again. Won't hurt. If you never made the change to ahci during installation then the default is ide, which is a pain during overclocking failures. If it still won't boot you should pull it out and hook it to the parents computer and make you a file there and save everything you don't want to lose, music and stuff. Put it back in, change back to ahci and do a clean install. If you want to wait for other posters to help out and do this a a last resort it won't hurt my feelings. Since it at least starts and then fails then that's a driver issue. That's probably why if fails during ahci boot. Did you create a boot disk??? You/it might have corrupted the MBR Master Boot Record, boot sector so it doesn't know where to start. That's why it stops on the flashing bar.
Follow this LINK to try to fix it.
 

suteck

Distinguished
ALL drivers Go to your motherboard's website and look for driver updates, download and install them one at a time. Sometimes you will have to uninstall a driver first, delete it also, then install the new downloaded ones from the manufacturer. Even it it's the same one. The old one might have gotten corrupted. GO HERE TO GET THEM. All you need to do is put in your vista 64 and it will take you to them.

Chipset (1)
AUDIO (2)
LAN (3)
Utilities (28)
SATA (4)
Others (6)
Just the newest versions of course and double check the utilities, If you don't use them don't install them, And if you already have them installed and you don't use them uninstall them.
And yes, the video card's driver also. Do you have any antispyware and antivirus software? Run those scans several times. Something corrupted your master boot record and that's a good place to look. If you have any other equipment look for and install updates for those also. Keep looking until you can boot normally into windows. Usually when you can boot into safe mode but have problems booting normally it is a driver issue. Probably got corrupted when your MBR did. I know it looks like a long way around either way but you're lucky you haven't already lost everything. That's why I recommed the ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

Or this is the time to save all your files you want to an external source and reinstall windows. Probably the easiest also. Especially since you were surfing the net when it happened. Sounds like a virus.
 

Fnecro

Distinguished
Nov 19, 2011
12
0
18,510
Wow thanks for the advice.

I just kept a boot log to see if anything in there would tell me what drivers are causing me issues. This is a copy of the boot log I am not exactly sure what to make of it.

Here is a link to pastebin since it is somewhat long. You will notice that this line appears A LOT:

"Did not load driver @cpu.inf,%intelppm.devicedesc%;Intel Processor"


http://pastebin.mozilla.org/1386513
 

suteck

Distinguished
Then I would update the bios also. Some of these will be repaired with the drivers reinstall. But I'm pretty sure some of them are actual windows drivers for windows itself that you won't be able to repair/replace. So I'm back to save your stuff and reinstall. But it shouldn't hurt to keep plugging away at it. Funny thing about windows, you never know what will work - and neither do they :pfff:
 

Fnecro

Distinguished
Nov 19, 2011
12
0
18,510
Yea, I think I will do a clean install. This gives me the motivation to upgrade to windows 7 anyways from vista. Thanks for all the help.

I am mostly displeased because my Skyrim save data somehow is lost haha.

Thank you for all the help though. Even if nothing worked, I learned a lot about troubleshooting for the future.