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Question

PC not booting up properly

Oct 10, 2018 7:48AM PDT

Alright, so a while ago i left my home for the summer and therefore i didn't use my PC for about 2-3 months. It worked perfectly fine before i left, but when i came back and attempted to boot it up, the issues started.
When i attempted to turn the PC on and it got past the Intel screen, a few possible things could happen:

1. it took me to a black screen with white text in the upper left corner that said:
"A bootable device has not been detected.
Please refer to the product guide at
http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop"

2. the same as 1., but this time the text said:
"No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key"

3. it would actually boot up normally and work, but from time to time, some of the programs that are running would freeze and stop responding for a few minutes (usually 2-5 mins, rarely longer) and sometimes even windows itself started acting a bit strange (the taskbar stopped responding and sort of "reloaded", the windows start screen stopped responding for a bit...etc)

Recently it seems to have gotten worse though. For the past few days, every time i tried to boot it up, the same "no bootable" device things happened but when it actually manages to get past that and get to the windows loading screen, it stays there for longer than usual and eventually results in a blue-screen, which would either cause a reboot or a freeze on said screen until i turned it off

What exactly is the problem here and what can i do about it?

(also i'm sorry for any grammatical/spelling errors, english isn't my native language )

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: boot problems
Oct 10, 2018 7:56AM PDT

Seems like a bad hard disk. Can happen.

Clone your current hard disk to a new one (or an SSD if not too big), then replace it with the new one. Might help, unless the old one is so damaged already that it can't be copied.
If it can't be copied, you have to reinstall Windows, reinstall all your programs and see what data that you forgot to backup you can still read from the old disk.

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I most likely can't
Oct 10, 2018 10:37AM PDT

I might be wrong, but from what i see, you need to have your PC on to copy over a hard disk, and my PC is currently only stuck on the two "no bootable device detected" texts and not really properly booting up.

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Tell why you can't.
Oct 10, 2018 11:43AM PDT

Kees wrote "If it can't be copied, you have to reinstall Windows, reinstall all your programs and see what data that you forgot to backup you can still read from the old disk."

This is the usual fix for blown OS drives. Why can't you do this?

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Re: clone
Oct 10, 2018 2:50PM PDT

You can clone the internal to an external disc after booting from, say, an Acronis True Image (not free, but there are free equivalents) optical disc. And a new disk often comes with license for the cloning part.

Google CLONE FREEWARE to find programs. If one of the 2 disks involved is Western Digital you can download and use the WD labeled version of Acronis.

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Try this
Oct 11, 2018 12:47AM PDT
https://www.backup-utility.com/download-iso.html
You will need a working machine to download the file and then burn it to a disc or usb stick.

Take either back to the busted machine and set the bios to boot from it.
Boot it up and select clone.
Select the input device then select the output device.
Hit go.
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Answer
Test
Oct 10, 2018 2:00PM PDT

Hi some.boi,

do you have another computer to test the hard drive? Happy