I was working on a long-running project in Adobe After Effects when suddenly my PC lagged for a few seconds and then completely froze, resulting in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with the message "Critical process died." After trying to restart, my PC initially worked for about a minute before freezing again with the same error. Now, when I boot up, it goes straight into BIOS and won't exit. No matter how many times I try turning it off and on, it just keeps landing in BIOS. Eventually, I manage to boot into Windows after waiting a while, but the same freezing issue happens again after about 15 minutes. Then, my PC stopped starting altogether—no sounds, nothing. I even tried re-plugging the power cable, but that didn't help. I'm really stuck and would appreciate any help!
2 Answers
First thing to do is check for dump files that can help diagnose the BSOD issue. If you can boot into Windows, or at least into Safe Mode, navigate to C:WindowsMinidump and look for any files there. If you find some, zip the folder and upload it to a file-sharing site. If you don’t see any dump files, you might need to adjust your settings to save small memory dumps. This will give us more information to work with.
If you're not able to load Windows, I recommend checking if BIOS is detecting your hard drive properly. This could be a sign of a failing drive. If the BIOS isn't recognizing your hard drive, it might have issues connecting to it, which could cause those crashing problems.
It seems like at first the BIOS recognized it, but then it stopped? Now my PC won’t even boot at all.