Hey everyone, I need some help troubleshooting a PC issue. I just moved and carefully packed my computer, so it shouldn't have been jostled around too much. Everything worked fine initially after I set it back up, but after a Windows update, my PC wouldn't boot past the BIOS screen the next day. I even waited over 30 minutes, but nothing changed.
I noticed that when I tried to access the BIOS control screen, it took almost half an hour to load. I attempted to boot from a recovery USB, but that caused the BIOS to freeze. I have three storage devices: two disk drives and an M.2 flash drive, which is what I usually boot from for speed. When I removed the M.2 drive, the BIOS responded quickly and even booted from the recovery USB, though I couldn't proceed since I didn't have any drives with Windows on them.
Plugging the M.2 back in slowed things down again. I suspect that one of two things might be happening: either the M.2 port on the motherboard is faulty, or the drive itself has issues after the Windows update. I'm planning to get an external M.2 reader to check if I can boot from it, and if that fails, I might buy a new smaller drive to install a fresh Windows instance. But I'd love some additional thoughts on what might be wrong!
2 Answers
Sounds like you're on the right track! I’d recommend checking the health of your M.2 drive first. It could be experiencing data corruption or even a hardware failure. You definitely don’t want to lose any important files if you can avoid it!
Have you tried reseating your RAM? Sometimes when your M.2 is in use, it could be affecting your motherboard's memory interaction. It might help to remove the RAM sticks and put them back in, or if you have multiple sticks, test with just one in different slots.
I’m not super familiar with RAM reset. Do I just pull them out and put them back in, or is there more to it?
I actually had a similar issue with my motherboard. I plugged my drive into a different M.2 port, thinking it would work, but it turned out the drive wasn't compatible with that port. Still, the motherboard recognized it was there, just couldn’t read it.