R
RandySteer1
This afternoon my PC suddenly froze (it's been great for years), and when I rebooted, it went into a repeating cycle of reboots. Powering off and even unplugging for a while all resulted in the same.
The repeating reboot cycle ended with a blank blue screen after the Dell logo and POST, but not a traditional intense-blue Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). This had no error message and was a soft "sea blue" that I associate with the default background of Windows 7. After about a minute, it shut down and started over.
Pressing F8 has no effect -- I was trying to get to Safe Mode or a recovery function, but it just went from the POST to the blank sea-blue screen.
I *was* able to get to a hardware boot and options menu by interrupting the POST, and ran a system diagnostic that found no problems with the hard drive, memory, processor, or anything else. Everything passed.
By unfortunate coincidence, a week or so ago I tried to use the Dell built-in utility to create recovery media on a USB flash drive (as a precaution before I upgrade to Windows 10) -- but the utility failed and said it couldn't create a bootable thumb drive.
Basic system info, I think it's about 6 years old -- i7 processor, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB hard drive, most recent version of BIOS (2019j, Windows 7 Pro.
I made a complete backup of my data about 2 weeks ago, so my data-loss risk is limited.
Most Q&A I read is about situations where the user can at least get F8 to work and can then go into safe mode and diagnose things or change boot settings, or can use recovery tools.
I appreciate suggestions. Thanks!
Continue reading...
The repeating reboot cycle ended with a blank blue screen after the Dell logo and POST, but not a traditional intense-blue Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). This had no error message and was a soft "sea blue" that I associate with the default background of Windows 7. After about a minute, it shut down and started over.
Pressing F8 has no effect -- I was trying to get to Safe Mode or a recovery function, but it just went from the POST to the blank sea-blue screen.
I *was* able to get to a hardware boot and options menu by interrupting the POST, and ran a system diagnostic that found no problems with the hard drive, memory, processor, or anything else. Everything passed.
By unfortunate coincidence, a week or so ago I tried to use the Dell built-in utility to create recovery media on a USB flash drive (as a precaution before I upgrade to Windows 10) -- but the utility failed and said it couldn't create a bootable thumb drive.
Basic system info, I think it's about 6 years old -- i7 processor, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB hard drive, most recent version of BIOS (2019j, Windows 7 Pro.
I made a complete backup of my data about 2 weeks ago, so my data-loss risk is limited.
Most Q&A I read is about situations where the user can at least get F8 to work and can then go into safe mode and diagnose things or change boot settings, or can use recovery tools.
- So has anyone seen THIS situation?
- Any recommendations for a reliable tool to restore an MBR, if that might be the problem?
- Might using a Windows 10 installation disk or Win 10 download to a thumb drive fix the problem without creating additional risk to data and installed programs? (Since I was planning on upgrading anyway...)
I appreciate suggestions. Thanks!
Continue reading...