When I got home, my PC was powered on and sitting in the BIOS setup screen. I'm trying to figure out whether that could happen by itself or whether someone may have turned it on and entered the BIOS. I'm using Windows 11 on a prebuilt system with an 11th-gen Intel i5-11400F, RTX 3060 Ti, Micron 2210 NVMe SSD, and 16 GB of RAM, although I don't know the motherboard model.
3 Answers
It’s also possible that someone pressed the power button and accidentally used the BIOS key, then didn’t know how to exit. There isn’t enough evidence to tell whether that happened, though, so first check whether Windows and your files start normally. If this happens repeatedly, investigate the motherboard, keyboard, storage drive, and power stability.
A hardware hiccup, failed startup attempt, or brief power interruption can sometimes cause a system to restart into the BIOS. It’s not the most common behavior, but it’s possible. Restart the computer and see whether it boots normally into Windows.
Check the BIOS afterward to see whether the boot drive is detected and whether the boot order still points to the NVMe SSD. Some motherboards also have an “ power on after power loss” setting, which could explain why the PC was running, although that alone wouldn’t necessarily explain the BIOS screen.
Power outages happen fairly often here, but the PC has never entered the BIOS before. It was also left turned off, so I’m not sure that setting would apply.