My dad's computer won't fully boot; it gets through the motherboard logo and shows the Windows 10 spinning circle, but then it just goes to a black screen. The issues started when he was setting something up for his 3D printer, and the program froze, displaying gray and black stripes before crashing. I've tried booting into safe mode and creating a new account for startup repair, but it says my dad's password is incorrect and the repair fails every time. We've reseated the RAM but that didn't help. Anyone have any ideas what might be going wrong and how to fix this? For details, his specs are an i7-3770, 12GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, a 250GB Samsung SSD, and a Radeon HD graphics card that doesn't show up in the BIOS.
1 Answer
First off, I'd suggest double-checking that the GPU and RAM are seated properly. You might even want to completely remove and reinsert them to be sure. If the issue persists, boot into the BIOS to see if the GPU is being detected at all. If it isn't, then that's a solid indicator of where the problem lies, possibly a faulty GPU. If that doesn’t fix it, you might need to consider reinstalling Windows—corrupt installation files can happen more often than you’d think.
We checked things this morning and found out the GPU wasn’t detected, which led us to discover that the motherboard slot is dead.