What can I do to troubleshoot PowerSpec G719 that’s unable to startup properly?

VivaldiInventedMetal

Hey everyone, this is my first post and I’d like to apologize in advance for the fact that I’m quite tech illiterate and this is the only desktop I’ve ever owned so feel free to explain things to me like I’m stupid. 

Just over 2 months ago I bought a PowerSpec G719 prebuild and an LG Ultra Gear monitor. I use it almost exclusively for gaming. The only issue I’ve had with it before this past week was on March 30th when I tried to do a Windows update and got a black screen for sometime so I booted into safe mode and couldn’t get anything to work including restarting, restore points, uninstalling the most recent updates, etc. so I finally turned it off, unplugged everything and then when I turned it back on it was fine and the updates had gone through but I got that error message “0x80070103” that other people seem to get when the PC doesn’t realize that the update has already been installed. Other than that it’s worked flawlessly until June 5th.

I live in an area that has had a lot of bad thunderstorms lately so I’ve gotten into the habit of unplugging the PC when there’s a risk of power surges & outages. This didn’t seem to cause any harm until this past Thursday when I went to turn it on after plugging it back in and it was unable to boot up properly. It starts up normally for like 5 seconds, then goes off for a couple seconds, then comes back on and says “preparing automatic repair”, goes into safe mode, and asks for bitlocker recovery key. I tried restart, restore points from multiple dates, and was even prepared to reset it just to see if that would enable it to load windows, but it says it’s unable to reset the PC for some reason.

Since I’m an extremely inexperienced PC owner I was hoping there’s a simple solution that I didn’t know about. I live 2 hours away from the nearest MC where I purchased it so even though I have the 2 year desktop extension plan I’d love to be able to troubleshoot it at home. Should I try to take the CMOS battery out and put it back in again or take out the ram and put it back in? Any suggestions would be helpful, thanks in advance.

Scary_Guy

This sounds like it is purely a Windows problem. Unplugging the power supply shouldn't harm it (but if you can afford it look into getting a UPS for it as it not only acts as surge protection but if the power does go out it will safely power it down and you wont lose any data. Just be sure to connect the USB cable and set up the software.)

That said, since you are new I'd look into running Linux on it, if only to test to see if the problem is either in the hardware or the OS. What you'll want to do is use another system to set up Ventoy on a USB drive, then download the UBCD https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and put that ISO file into the Ventoy partition on that USB drive. Put that stick in your computer and try to boot (you may need to go into the UEFI BIOS and change some settings to get it to work.)

UBCD may not even be the best tool for the job, but it is pretty good. The nice thing about Ventoy is you can load any ISO on it like a multicart and try whichever one you want.

Good luck on your computer journey. They can do way more than just gaming!