New Mystery Issue - Machine Won't Boot or Get Past Initial Black Screen

[britechguy]

All I can say is I must be incredibly, incredibly lucky. I have no reason whatsoever to report something like this unless it were my personal experience.

I'm an outlier on the bell curve.

 

[fincoder]

But, my heavens!, they've become incredibly more durable in recent decades.

In my experience they fail much more often now!

HDD failure is just as common now as ever, some would say more common.

When I say failure, that includes slowness prompting me to do a quick health check and finding bad sectors (e.g. Crystal Disk Info CAUTION). I find that some techs and enthusiasts take a different diagnostic approach and reload the OS or tinker with software to try and improve speed, and it might help a little. However they aren't addressing the root cause and it will get worse again or completely fail. In some of these cases it might go for another year before it fails to boot, but in the mean time they're suffering from very sluggish operation.

 

[Markverhyden]

Either you've been very lucky or you're not looking hard enough. I can't even count on fewer than two hands the number of failed or failing HDDs I've seen this year.

Break/fix is almost nothing for me. And I've seen 6 drive failures this year, 4 my own.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@britechguy I wasn't thinking the new PSU had a bad 5v rail, I was thinking the old one did. Dead PSUs have a substantial risk of taking other things with them. The 3 rails have a 10% tolerance, so usually the 3.3v drops below 3v and that system doesn't boot. Since that rail has the lowest margin for failure. That fault doesn't hurt much.

But if the 5v rail goes... you can kiss the drives good bye.
If the 12v rail goes... Well I've only had a handful of those blow in my career, and every one of them was very nearly the start of a structure fire. And yeah, machine was toast too... mainboard never survives it. Drives sometimes do though.

But yeah, if it's a platter... it dies. SSDs don't... until they do... ugh they are annoying when they go. But in this case my gut says the old PSU weakened the drive, causing the failure.

 

[GTP]

I had this happen very recently. Black screen on bootup. "No Boot Device Found" etc.
What got it working for me was as follows:
1. Boot with a PE (recommend Gandalf's) Test the drive with GSmartControl and Crystal Disk Info. No problems found.
2. Cloned the disk to a backup drive with Odin. Also made a VHD with Disk2VHD so that I could play with it in a VM if needed.
I also ran Fabs AutoBackup on the drive.
3. Ran chkdsk on the drive twice - rebooting to the PE between.
4. Reboot. PC booted to desktop which allowed me to test the drive again. Passed.
5. Gave the drive a good cleanup removed some malware, PuP's and dodgy software (ReImage Repair) that Defender let in and recommended Emsisoft. Also recommended the client to go SSD. They said no "not right now" but have indicated that they may shortly.

So far still working perfectly.

 

[sapphirescales]

I had this happen very recently. Black screen on bootup. "No Boot Device Found" etc.
What got it working for me was as follows:
1. Boot with a PE (recommend Gandalf's) Test the drive with GSmartControl and Crystal Disk Info. No problems found.
2. Cloned the disk to a backup drive with Odin. Also made a VHD with Disk2VHD so that I could play with it in a VM if needed.
I also ran Fabs AutoBackup on the drive.
3. Ran chkdsk on the drive twice - rebooting to the PE between.
4. Reboot. PC booted to desktop which allowed me to test the drive again. Passed.
5. Gave the drive a good cleanup removed some malware, PuP's and dodgy software (ReImage Repair) that Defender let in and recommended Emsisoft. Also recommended the client to go SSD. They said no "not right now" but have indicated that they may shortly.

So far still working perfectly.

Holy crap. How much did you charge to do all that stuff? Must've taken forever. With how much I would've had to charge to do all that stuff, I would have just quoted a replacement SSD and data backup. 1 hour of my time + a cheap SSD vs. 2-3 hours doing all that crap and leaving client with a slow as molasses hard drive.

 

[britechguy]

My sincere thanks to all who've taken the time and effort to reply.

At this juncture I intend to tell the client that my recommendation is either to replace his now-dead HDD with an SSD, or to go with my original recommendation, which was a new computer. @Barcelona, even if I could get what you propose to work, I simply would not trust that drive to continue working. It went "off like a light switch" once, and have every expectation of a "return engagement" of that behavior.

My gut is also telling me that the data on that drive may end up being unrecoverable (by me, anyway) and may require a professional data recovery service. I do not know for certain whether there's anything that the client really needs off of it, which I will be asking tomorrow.

In the end, the choices I will offer to him are the two mentioned above, and if neither is acceptable he's going to have to find another tech. We get along well, and I am sure one route or the other will be preferable.

I will also try my darndest to convince him to acquire an external USB backup HDD and to establish a backup protocol for him to follow. It doesn't matter if you've got an SSD or HDD, you really need to be backing up your system, as well as user data separately, to prevent just these kinds of messes. Whether that advice is taken is a very open question.

 

[britechguy]

How much did you charge to do all that stuff? Must've taken forever.

Which circles back to something I have said frequently: Money generally matters, and to some clients a lot more than others, so doing what's most economical, but that will get the necessary result, is always at the very front of my mind.

My days of always trying to solve the presenting problem by taking deep dives "under the hood," with no guarantee that those will yield fruit, are over. That's a big part of the reason I will not do anything that takes more than 5 minutes, max, as far as fixing issues with unsupported software. The next thing that breaks with it is always right around the corner, and much of it is security Swiss cheese.

I am no longer focused on learning everything I can about the root cause of a presenting problem, and I once was. Now it's about fixing what's broken with maximum speed and minimal cost. And my recommendations are made accordingly.

 

[sapphirescales]

My days of always trying to solve the presenting problem by taking deep dives "under the hood," with no guarantee that those will yield fruit, are over.

The world is different than it was back then. Reinstalling Windows 98 from scratch, backing up and restoring all those programs, dealing with driver issues, etc. was a huge pain in the butt that could literally take all day. It was worth investing an hour or two to try and "fix" the issue with the operating system. I can load a Windows 10 image on an SSD in literally 5 minutes. Unless they've got EXPENSIVE software that can't be replaced, I'm re-imaging the system after backing up the important data.

Now it's about fixing what's broken with maximum speed and minimal cost.

This is my goal as well. I might charge a lot of money for my services, but that just means that doing things quickly is even more important. Most systems I spend 30-60 minutes on and I make an average of $370 or close to it (I'm too lazy to look it up right now). I'm not going to spend 2-3 hours on a system without charging 2-3x my hourly average. Doing so would be stupid. I replaced a DC jack on a Dell laptop today. Charged $350. Part cost me $11. Took about 30 minutes including interacting with the client, ordering the part, and installing it.

I'm not going to muck around in Windows for 2 hours trying to find rootkits or trying to fix the start menu unless someone is paying me at LEAST $500 for it. It's cheaper for me to spend 30 minutes re-imaging their system and getting them an SSD upgrade for $350, and they end up with a better computer in the end.

That's a big part of the reason I will not do anything that takes more than 5 minutes, max, as far as fixing issues with unsupported software.

I actually spent 2 hours trying to get the Adobe CS6 master suite to work with High Sierra. It was worth it to them because they don't want to have to spend $50/month on the software (I actually think the price is like $78/month or something now). It sucked nuts. I had to do a fresh install of El Capitan on a new SSD and upgrade it to High Sierra in order to get it to work.

I also had to do some workarounds to get Dragon Naturally Speaking to work in Mojave. They discontinued the software for Macs several years ago but this guy absolutely had to have it for his job. Paid me $400 to get it working.

Macs make me good money, but God, I freaking hate them. Apple designs their hardware and their software so that everything becomes obsolete almost instantly. They only support their OS for 1-2 years and then they make you upgrade to the new one, which is full of bugs and will only work on basically brand new hardware. 3rd and 4th gen i5/i7 systems are still perfectly usable for a PC and will work for 3-5+ years, but on a Mac it's "obsolete" and can't run the new software. This would be fine if Apple actually supported their old software, but they don't. These 4th gen MacBooks still go for close to $1,000 even though they're basically obsolete thanks to Apple's non-existent OS support. A 4th gen i7 Mac is basically just as obsolete as a Core 2 Duo PC. Worse actually because you can technically still run Windows 10 on a Core 2 Duo PC.

 

[frase]

Happened to me today, took out HDD tested all fine - no reallocated sectors etc. Reconnected to system same issue, disconnected put into my dock and ran CHKDSK as @Barcelona did as well. Rebuilt MBR etc while I was there. Took me about 15mins to work out the issue. I then connected back to original system booted fine. If you are wary, ask client if they would like you to upgrade to an SSD as you stated & image the drive > transfer data.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I haven't put a platter into a production machine in almost two years. I charge two hours of labor to reinstall a platform on a platter, and only an hour for the same on an SSD. The SSD costs less than the price of an hour of labor.

In short... it's cheaper to do a reinstall / SSD image with me than it is to do a reinstall if you insist on keeping your old crap drive. 4 year service life can kiss my rear... not to mention all the time lost because platters are just too slow.

 

[Fred Claus]

I've not read all the posts here but I had this happen once or twice on a client computer. How long did you leave it on before you say it won't get past the screen? I've had an update take 3 hours before it went off the black screen and allow them to log in.

 

[britechguy]

This isn't about getting to the login screen. It stops dead saying there's no boot drive.

I strongly suspect that there's going to be nothing I can get back from that drive, though I'll never say never. I have never had a hard drive go from 100% functioning to zero like this before. My experiences are that you get weeks to months of warning signs, which is usually way more than you need to know that a replacement is necessary.

I've had plenty of hard drives in the process of failing in my years in this business, but this is the one and only that went out like a light switch. And when I'm doing break-fix work, which is my "bread and butter," it's just not customary to do diagnostics unrelated to the presenting issue when the presenting issue is a dead PSU. All the more so when the machine boots up just like always once the new PSU is in.

There are always disconcerting surprises when it comes to computers, that's for sure!

 

[Sky-Knight]

You'll go from 100% to dead in the case of a controller failure due to electrical fault, or a head crash... which can also be caused by an electrical fault.

It is relatively rare... but I had one do that to me just a couple weeks ago. Client spent $1000 getting the data back, and is FINALLY letting me move them into M365 with Backupify so this crap can't happen again.

And all of this heardache, because they just wouldn't schedule me replacing that platter with an SSD in the bosses desktop. $80 part vs $1000 data recovery...

All of the above I've been pestering them to do for TWO YEARS.

DEATH TO ALL THE HDDS!

And slaps for people without backups in 2020.

 

[britechguy]

Well, I'm still not in the, "Death to all HDDs!!," camp. If you have the need for copious quantities of storage at a reasonable price, and with what I consider to be way more than just decent reliability, they're still the gold standard.

SSDs are no longer a luxury as a main system drive though, that's for sure.

But the slaps to people who don't take backups as a routine part of computer ownership in 2020 could be backdated at least 10 years, perhaps more, to the time when very large capacity USB external backup HDDs became dirt cheap. I can have sympathy, at least some, for residential users who often simply do not know better until disaster has struck at least once. But businesses deserve every bit of grief they get if they've not been taking backups and disaster strikes (with regard to their storage media on the computer, mind you).

 

[InHomeComputerHelp.com]

always remember that computers are just glorified light bulbs - they rarely fail in continuous use and usually go pop when turned off and on.

Mind if I use that?

Rick

 

[britechguy]

Mind if I use that?

Rick

Seconded! And if you're OK with it, and want actual attribution by real name, let me know what that is.

 

[Computer Bloke]

Mind if I use that?

It's all yours!

And if you're OK with it, and want actual attribution by real name, let me know what that is.

It belongs to Rick now - best to attribute it to him.

 

[sapphirescales]

Well, I'm still not in the, "Death to all HDDs!!," camp. If you have the need for copious quantities of storage at a reasonable price, and with what I consider to be way more than just decent reliability, they're still the gold standard.

And tape drives are still used at big businesses. That doesn't mean I'm going to recommend a tape drive to a client. Hard drives nowadays are only useful for the odd client that has 2+TB worth of data (which in my experience is extremely rare). I have tons of business clients that still use them on NAS servers, and they make a good/effective/cheap backup as an external drive, but the average consumer will never use a hard drive inside their computer again.

I still use hard drives for data storage. Every one of my computers has at least a 6TB hard drive, and one of my computers has 4x 12TB drives. I have a NAS storage device with more than 100TB. To replace all these drives with SSD's would be so expensive it's just not practical. But then again, I'm not my client. I have one client with half a petabyte of storage. They run a photography studio and also shoot 4k video. It's never fun when they call.

 

[britechguy]

And tape drives are still used at big businesses. That doesn't mean I'm going to recommend a tape drive to a client. Hard drives nowadays are only useful for the odd client that has 2+TB worth of data (which in my experience is extremely rare).

I did not say I recommended HDDs for internal storage. I have plenty of clients who may not have even Terabytes of data, but who might wish to keep three iterations of their full system image backups. That's always going to go on to HDDs (external, at this point in time for laptops).

I have one client who has both an internal HDD backup and a second external USB HDD backup.

Different strokes for different folks. I'm certainly not going to recommend SSDs for external storage of large amounts of data simply due to cost.

I also do not love SSDs as many do for one of the reasons mentioned, repeatedly, in this very topic. They tend to fail out of the blue with zero warning before doing so. And data recovery costs for SSDs, well, don't get me started. They're fabulous provided you have backup, but if you don't, they're worse than HDDs if failure occurs as far as getting data back.