I'm having trouble booting up my PC. When I power it on, it just gets stuck on the initial loading screen. If I reboot a few times, I eventually see the 'Preparing Automatic Repair' screen, but that doesn't go anywhere either. I can access the BIOS and even get to a boot selection screen with F11, but that's as far as I can get.
I've created two different USBs using the Windows Media Creation Tool, one formatted as NTFS and the other as FAT32. However, when I try to boot from the USB, I only briefly see the four blue squares before the screen goes black and nothing happens. I've tried toggling secure boot, TPM 2.0, and fast boot, and I've switched between IGD and PEG settings with different monitor connections. I also messed with UEFI and CSM options, reseated the RAM and GPU, and cleared the CMOS.
I can see the hard drive in BIOS, which makes me think it might not be a hard drive issue, though I'm leaning towards possibly a motherboard problem. I'd appreciate any advice or thoughts before I consider replacing the motherboard. Just as an update, the PC has been running fine for the last seven months with no hardware changes, and it currently has Windows 11.
1 Answer
It sounds like you're doing a lot of the right troubleshooting steps already! Just a heads-up, the media creation tool will format the USB to FAT32 for you, so no need to pre-format it. I wouldn't jump straight to thinking the motherboard is the issue. Maybe try booting with just one stick of RAM and unplug all unnecessary peripherals. Sometimes, a failing drive can still show up in BIOS but can freeze the system when the PC tries to access it. If nothing else works, you might want to remove the drives entirely to see if it boots from the USB alone.
Yeah, I was thinking that too! Shouldn't a failing drive at least let you boot from the USB? I haven't even gotten to the point where I can select a drive to repair or reinstall Windows.