Powerspec G460 no longer boots

gamer0farmer

Computer locked up and required a hard reboot.  Ever since, it no longer completes the boot sequence.  Upon powerup, it displays a black screen saying "Powerspec" with a rotating circle of dots at the bottom.  Stays on this screen for about 60 seconds with rotating dots, then automatically cycles off and back on.  Repeats.

Checked the BIOS and it recognizes the boot drive 500GB SSD in the M2 slot 1.  Can specify to boot from this (is set as default anyway) but behaves as described. 

It feels like a bad sector (or whatever for SSD) in a critical boot function on the drive.  I do not have another computer with a M2 slot for testing.  Don't know if it can be recovered or if I need a new SSD.  This is a gaming rig, so I lose no real data, but I have slow broadband so rebuilding steam library would be a chore.

TSPhillipT

Hello @gamer0farmer!  Welcome to the Micro Center Community!

I will agree with you that it is a bad boot on the M.2, however it could either be a corrupted Windows installation caused by Windows, or corrupted by a bad sector on the M.2.  Have you tried doing a Clean Install of Windows 10 onto the M.2?  Ideally the clean install works and everything returns to normal.  If the Clean Install does not work, it is looking to be a bad SSD and you may want to swap it out for another SSD.  

gamer0farmer

would the clean install reformat the entire drive or just a boot partition?  Trying to avoid blanking out my games library, but not being able to boot is the bigger issue here.

TSTonyV

A clean install would be completely reformatting the drive and doing a fresh install of Windows. If you have a set of Windows installation media, you could boot from it and attempt to do an automatic repair that way. 

PowerSpec_MikeW

It would wipe out the entire drive. As other alternatives you can manually rebuild the boot sector. I would boot from windows 10 media. If you need it, you can create media here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

First, lets just check the drive. Go to the repair options then Troubleshoot > Advanced > Command Prompt. We'll be doing most of our work from there. Check disk. Type: chkdsk /r

Let see if that finds any issues with your drive. If it seems fine, try running system restore from the recovery environment. Your boot sector seems intact, it tries to boot, but never successfully loads and eventually crashes. Probably the drive in my opinion. To rebuild the boot sector:

Comments are in parenthesis.

Type:
diskpart 
list disk (Lists your drives)
select disk # (We want to select the the M.2 drive in question)
list volume (Lists volumes on the selected disk)
select volume # (We're looking for the system partition. It'll state this in the description, it will not have a letter assigned.)
Assign letter=<system partition> (We can use L here for the as an example. Any letter that isn't in use is fine.)
cd /d <letter of system partition>:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ (We're just navigating to the location of the bcd file)
ren bcd bcd.bak (We're getting the original bcd file out of the way)
bcdboot C:\Windows /s <system partition>: /f all (System partition being L in our example. It's rewriting the bcd file)

From here try to reboot the system. If it's the drive we may encounter an error at any point here, which could leave is a less bootable state. Backup first, be prepared to reinstall the OS beyond this.