This morning, while I was browsing the web, my PC froze up completely. When the usual Ctrl+Alt+Del didn't work, I had to do a hard reset. Now, I keep getting stuck at the UEFI BIOS screen every time I boot it up. I've already attempted a few things:
- I hit F5 in the BIOS to try resetting to defaults.
- I removed my NVME drive and reinserted it.
- I changed the CMOS battery.
- I unplugged my second hard drive to see if that would make a difference.
Online searches suggest it might be a faulty hard drive, but up until this morning, my PC had been running fine. Is it possible for my SSD to just fail out of the blue? The boot priority list in the BIOS screen is completely empty, and even after connecting the second hard drive, nothing appears. I want to make sure it isn't anything else before I head to Best Buy to get a new drive. The SSD was replaced a couple of years ago, but I can't recall what issue prompted the change back then.
3 Answers
Have you tried resetting the CMOS? Just completely power off your PC, set the PSU switch to "0", unplug everything, take out the CMOS battery, and then hold the power button for 10 seconds to drain any residual charge. Wait about 20 minutes before plugging everything back in. And for the future, consider turning off fast startup in Windows to avoid this problem. If it crashes while updating, it can really mess things up.
It's strange that nothing is showing up in the boot priority list. If your drives aren’t even recognized in the hardware device list, they might be dead or malfunctioning. You can try remapping them to different slots if you have any, especially for the NVME. If you can see them in the BIOS but not boot into Windows, it could just be a software issue, and a reinstall might fix that. Make sure to have a USB drive handy just in case!
Definitely try a clean install and see if the drives show up during Windows installation. If they aren't there and aren’t detected in the BIOS either, your SSD might have failed. You can experiment by placing it in another M.2 slot if your motherboard has one. If that doesn't work, you might need to get a replacement.
Related Questions
Lenovo Thinkpad Stuck In Update Loop Install FilterDriverU2_Reload