Advice Needed Windows 10 Start-up Green Screen - and no Safe Mode!

[jeallen01]

If the Acer were totally dead I think it might be easier to sort the problem or strip it for useful bits and bin the rest!

Having been out shopping with SWMBO this afternoon, I haven't yet got around to taking the (very small - about 9"x9") m/b as I can't yet see a way to actually wiggle it out the case because it has external connectors and case lugs on every side! (just look up putting more memory in a Veriton N2620 on Youtube - that's actually quite easy - and see what I will be faced with when trying to get to the hard drive!).

 

[jeallen01]

This is the post I was talking about Motherboard has died

If the drive you're checking is formatted in NTFS then you can use the Win 8 switches I used. these are /scan and /forceofflinefix

Paul

Got the h/d out this evening and stuck it in a USB caddy - firstly on the W7 machine, which did not work, and then in the W10 Dell - but even that had problems with the switches you showed, and, in fact, Checkdisk on that one actually gave recommendations which translated into the switch "/offlinescanandfix" - which worked and found and corrected some problems on the C:\ drive.

Stuck the h/d back in the Acer (not an easy task and took several tries - but I'm learning), and then booted it up : Different startup result that got me into the diagnostic and repair sequences. Tried a system restore but it could not find one to restore (OOPs) and so told it to try to boot normally - at which point the GSOD came back, as it did again when I powered it down and up again .

Out came the disk again and into the caddy for another chkdsk session with the above switch - but that could find nothing wrong this time??? Will put it back in the ACER tonight or tomorrow and "pray" - or else it's on to the more serious remedial work

 

[PaulR]

I'm surprised that /scan and /forceofflinefix wouldn't work with Win10. If you think about it /offlinescanandfix sounds as though it's a combination of the first two switches but without forcing the fix. Maybe the two switches (and they have to be used together) might work this time around?

 

[jeallen01]

Paul

I did try the two switches in the order (FWIW) you suggested, and chkdsk under Win 10 fell over because it did not recognise one of them (can't remember which ATM) - not sure it won't do the same again, but I will try again tomorrow.

 

[PaulR]

The order shouldn't matter as long as they are both applied at the same time.

Perhaps Win 10 has changed from Win8 (I thought not) or it's a Dell peculiarity.

If you type "chkdsk/?" (without the quotes) you'll get a list of all the switches that are available.

 

[jeallen01]

The order shouldn't matter as long as they are both applied at the same time.

Perhaps Win 10 has changed from Win8 (I thought not) or it's a Dell peculiarity.

If you type "chkdsk/?" (without the quotes) you'll get a list of all the switches that are available.

Paul

The O/S on the Dell has been upgraded several times (originally XP Pro as purchased refurbed about 7 yrs ago, then upgraded by me to Win 7 Pro and finally to Win 10 Pro) and I doubt that there is little if anything left of the original Dell XP installation - so I also doubt that that has anything to do with what happened.

I did chkdsk/? but can't remember the full list of switches that was displayed - will do again tomorrow and post a screenshot FYI.

 

[Lazarus]

FYI?

Is that a TLA?

 

[jeallen01]

FYI?

Is that a TLA?

FYI, IIRC, is TLA. LoL

 

[Lazarus]

TYVM.

(That is a FLA)

 

[jeallen01]

TYVM to you too for introducing me to a new one to me!

 

[Lazarus]

YAMW

 

[jeallen01]

Paul

Here is the chkdsk/? list of options:


But this is what I got when I used the /scan & /forceofflinefix switches separately


Finally, to cap it all and having then done the /offlinescanandfix again, the machine would not boot beyond the initial flash screen - so then I formatted the c:\ partition and now it won't even get into the BIOS although it states for a second that it is entering it. So I think it is now totally FUBAR (probably the processor has gone)!

 

[jeallen01]

OTOH, it looks like I might have spoken a little too soon about the processor - several more-in-hope-than-expectation reboots got me back to a situation where it does actually boot into the BIOS if hit Delete on power up, or to a "Your PC/Device needs to be repaired" with the further messages
- it can't find "\windows\system32\winload.exe" - which is not surprising as the C:\ partition has been formatted, but then still gives the same message if I boot with a Win 7 Pro installation disc in a DVD reader or a Win 10Pro USB installation/upgrade USB stick in one of the ports, with removable device as the first boot device.

- + the Errorcode 0xc000000f.

Tells me I need recovery tools - but without it being able to read a CD/DVD or USB drive, then they won't be of much use.

Also "interesting" is that the wireless keyboard works but the USB one does not - so now wondering if I have accidently done something to the USB controller or ports (but then the wireless keyboard uses the Logitech wireless dongle in a USB port!)
Edited: the road to recovery beckons - had to change something else in the BIOS and now it's booting from the USB stick - maybe, or maybe not as it ran into a problem with the MBR format of the hard disc as the BIOS is EFI.

 

[PaulR]

If you've now formatted the HDD then I don't think anything will help now.

I wish that you'd told us what the error message was before though. The first screenshot shows that the chkdsk switches are available. The second screen is interesting, I suspect that you need to log in to the second machine as an administrator. If you were logged in as an administrator then I'm not sure what the problem but it's all academic now after the formatting!

 

[jeallen01]

Paul

You may well be correct on the above, but the more I play with the hard disk from the ACER, the more I think it has actually failed - and so I suspect that anything much will be futile because it was on its death bed when this all started, and is now a "wonky" MBR disk after I played with it and not a GPT one (and so WIN 7 or 10 won't install on the Primary Partition in a machine with a UEFI BIOS, and I'm really getting to not like this BIOS type after all the problems I had reverting my little ASUS netbook to WIN 7 after 2 failed WIN 10 upgrades) - I tried to convert it from MBR to GPT with various utilities but failed.

Just trying a last resuscitation attempt on it in the caddy connected to my Win 7 laptop before I bin it - even Disc Manager is having trouble reading it, which should not be a problem in a USB 3 caddy on a USB 3 port. Can't even format or delete volumes and partitions - The disk seems FUBAR.

 

[PaulR]

It's certainly possible the HDD is goosed although my experience is that it's quite rare.

Good luck.

 

[jeallen01]

It's certainly possible the HDD is goosed although my experience is that it's quite rare.

Good luck.

Turns out I have an identical WD drive that came out of a netbook that died for a different reason - so trying that now, and Windows Disk Manager has no difficulty in reading it (whereas it can't do anything with the old one).

 

[jeallen01]

Update:

I completely removed any volumes and partitions on the replacement disk with the W10 Pro m/c , put it back in the ACER, reinstalled W7 Pro (luckily I have a set of disks from the earlier upgrade of the W10 Pro m/c), and everything appeared to go according to plan after I ignored an early Win 7 installation error message that said there might be something wrong with the disk that would not allow it to boot. However, when the installation process was complete, I disconnected the CD/DVD reader and rebooted the machine - and voila it booted back to the desktop!

A lot of work still to do to get everything back to normal - but I think that all proved that the old disk was completely FUBAR'd/on its deathbed.

In this case the demise was more like Sir Terry's DEATH than, maybe, Mr Nadella's GSOD - but I'm sure the latter lot had something to do with it somewhere! So, I would always be aware that the GSOD may come to haunt you sometime/somewhere!

PS: have got very good at whipping the disk out of the ACER and putting it back in again - down to less than 5 mins in either direction, but I'm running low on heatsink compound as I had to replace that every time because you have to remove and refit the CPU fan!

 

[PaulR]

Good work.

 

[jeallen01]

Well, the ACER actually took a couple more disk rebuilds after complete system crashes before it stabilized, and is now partitioned as previously and am installing various things (notably all the required updates using WSUS).

Had quite a few problems trying to get some of right drivers loaded because the ACER has an unusual setup and I could not get the ACER driver utilities to work in some areas.

Then I accidently came across a utility called "Driverpack-Online" (here) which claims to analyse your PC and download and install the relevant drivers - and it actually did do the business (much to my amazement)! The only thing it could not sort was, surprisingly, the Logitech wireless dongle for the mouse and keyboard but both are working anyway and so I'm not bothered for the moment.

The utility is "free" but be warned that it also installs things like OPERA and several other programmes & utilities that you might or might not want - as well as a whole load of hidden PUPs of potentially dubious nature, as I found out when I immediately installed & ran Malwarebytes Free which found over 200 and so I deleted them!

Nevertheless, I wish had known about Driverpack-online when Morgans actually first sent me an N4620g (which has a different/better Icore 3 processor, bigger disk & so on) by mistake and I could not get it to run at all cleanly because of various drivers issues (I think they ghosted that m/c with the image for the N2620, and so it had the wrong drivers!), complained a lot and finally got Morgans to replace it with the N2620g. Had I had that utility originally, there's a fair chance I could have got the 4620g running - and that would then have been a real "bargain".

Finally, as far as the original disk is concerned, this morning I ran diskpart (learnt quite a bit about that over the last couple of days! ) in the caddy connected to the W7m/c, selected the disk in question, and then ran the "clean" command - and that actually wiped everything off the disk. Simple single volume format followed by checkdisk showed no error or bad sectors - so it might actually have been alright "under the skin" if I had managed to do that a couple of days ago. Anyway, won't bin it just yet...