troubleshooting black screens & boot failure
Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 7:17 am
Hi all,
After over 5 years of near 24/7 operation, my HTPC has started to exhibit a major problem.
Build:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L
CPU: Intel Celeron E3300 LGA775 @ stock clocks + Scythe Ninja Mini.
RAM: G.Skill 2 x 2GB DDR2-400 (F2-6400CL5-2GBNT)
GPU: EVGA Nvidia GT220
SSD: Crucial M500 128GB SSD (boot, Windows & apps)
HDD: Seagate 500GB 3.5" (media)
OS: Windows 7 Pro x64
PSU: Antec EarthWatts 380 Watt that came with my NSK2480
Symptoms:
While watching recorded TV on Sunday night (Windows Media Center), in the middle of play-back of a recording, sudden audio & video garbage, then black screen with the message "missing boot volume". I hard powered off and powered back on, and Windows booted. I ran: SFC /SCANNOW, which found nothing. Scratching my head, we resumed watching the recording. A few minutes later, another crash to black screen & the same error message. Ugh.
What I've done:
I ran Memtest overnight: 11 passes, no errors found.
i then ran Spinrite at level 2 on the SSD. It found and recovered data from several dozen bad sectors at the very end of the SSD. It found no problems with the HDD.
This morning the PC started POST, but was very slow to initialize installed components. And then the missing boot volume error as above. I could not get into Windows. I didn't have much time to keep trying before work.
What do these symptoms suggest? Failing SSD? Failing SATA controller? Failing motherboard? Short of replacing parts one by one with 5+ year-old hardware (which I don't have), I'm not sure how to continue testing.
Tonight I'll keep trying to get into Windows; maybe there's something in the event logs.
Maybe boot a live CD (shares the SATA controller) and do some stressful disk operations to see if it crashes again? If it does, boot from USB (doesn't use the SATA controller) and test again?
I would prefer to fix this machine, since it does everything I need it to do despite its age. In case I can't, I have some new Skylake parts on order (mobo, CPU and DDR4). But I'd rather not spend a weekend reinstalling & patching Windows, etc. if I don't have to.
Thanks,
Jay
After over 5 years of near 24/7 operation, my HTPC has started to exhibit a major problem.
Build:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L
CPU: Intel Celeron E3300 LGA775 @ stock clocks + Scythe Ninja Mini.
RAM: G.Skill 2 x 2GB DDR2-400 (F2-6400CL5-2GBNT)
GPU: EVGA Nvidia GT220
SSD: Crucial M500 128GB SSD (boot, Windows & apps)
HDD: Seagate 500GB 3.5" (media)
OS: Windows 7 Pro x64
PSU: Antec EarthWatts 380 Watt that came with my NSK2480
Symptoms:
While watching recorded TV on Sunday night (Windows Media Center), in the middle of play-back of a recording, sudden audio & video garbage, then black screen with the message "missing boot volume". I hard powered off and powered back on, and Windows booted. I ran: SFC /SCANNOW, which found nothing. Scratching my head, we resumed watching the recording. A few minutes later, another crash to black screen & the same error message. Ugh.
What I've done:
I ran Memtest overnight: 11 passes, no errors found.
i then ran Spinrite at level 2 on the SSD. It found and recovered data from several dozen bad sectors at the very end of the SSD. It found no problems with the HDD.
This morning the PC started POST, but was very slow to initialize installed components. And then the missing boot volume error as above. I could not get into Windows. I didn't have much time to keep trying before work.
What do these symptoms suggest? Failing SSD? Failing SATA controller? Failing motherboard? Short of replacing parts one by one with 5+ year-old hardware (which I don't have), I'm not sure how to continue testing.
Tonight I'll keep trying to get into Windows; maybe there's something in the event logs.
Maybe boot a live CD (shares the SATA controller) and do some stressful disk operations to see if it crashes again? If it does, boot from USB (doesn't use the SATA controller) and test again?
I would prefer to fix this machine, since it does everything I need it to do despite its age. In case I can't, I have some new Skylake parts on order (mobo, CPU and DDR4). But I'd rather not spend a weekend reinstalling & patching Windows, etc. if I don't have to.
Thanks,
Jay